Summary:

At long last Bridget Jones (Renée Zellweger) -- a 30-something, self-doubting, self-analyzing, career-minded, calorie-counting London singleton -- has found romantic bliss. For six glorious weeks, she has been the girlfriend of the exquisitely flawless human rights lawyer Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and nothing could be better. Or -- could it? Despite Darcy's apparent devotion, Bridget still finds herself asking questions about life, love and the proper way to put away underwear. Having finally found her man, Bridget is faced with the challenge of keeping him. She can't help but wonder: what exactly is it that comes after the happily ever after? And just as she's starting to figure it all out, enter the competition: Darcy's drop-dead, legs-up-to-there, never-says-the-wrong-thing new colleague. Suddenly jealousy, uncertainty and temptation -- in the form of Bridget's former boss and womanizing heartthrob Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) -- threaten to upend Bridget's dream in a comic maze of bad advice, silly mix-ups and total disasters that could only happen to her.

The bloom is off the rose as Renee Zellweger's navel-gazing British martyr returns to beat herself up on behalf of overfed, obsessive romantics everywhere. Once again, she gets to choose between the emotionally repressed Colin Firth and the sexually profligate Hugh Grant. With Gemma Jones, Jim Broadbent. Directed by Beeban Kidron. 1:48 (language, sexual content).

Misbegotten comedy sequels have a way of resembling souring relationships. All those adorable idiosyncrasies that initially melted your heart can curdle into the very irritating habits that send you packing.

Enter "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason," the screechy follow-up to the charming "Bridget Jones's Diary." Granted, it's been an unusually difficult three years for all of us since the hapless TV journalist played by Renee Zellweger bagged her Prince Charming. But somewhere in the interim, this ungainly but endearing exemplar of pudgy duckling dreams has turned into a tiresome buffoon, a working woman's Lucy Ricardo with an unerring divining rod for pigsties and deep, splashy puddles.

Renee Zellweger has once again traded off her Roxie Hart foxiness for the boxy British bull in a china shop created by novelist Helen Fielding. The perennially single Bridget is so thrilled to have hit the jackpot with the gallant advocate Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), she brags to every living creature that her boyfriend is a human-rights lawyer. Like many who still suffer the effects of long-term romantic deprivation, however, she keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But Mark, as Renee Zellweger confides to us in breathy voiceovers, is "perfect." It would seem so. No matter how wiggly her waistline, how unwarranted her outbursts of jealousy or how abrasive her insults to his conservative colleagues, Mark keeps coming back for more. And Bridget, practiced neurotic that she is, is ready to dish it out.

For better or worse, Bridget still has her unctuously sexed-up colleague Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant) as a fallback.

When she suspects Mark is two-timing her, off she goes with Daniel on assignment to Thailand, where she runs afoul of the law and winds up in the slammer with a cell full of wronged women who can't sing "Like a Virgin" to save their lives.

Despite its nods to the writings of Jane Austen and Thomas Paine, "Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason" owes more to the celluloid oeuvre of Brittany Murphy and Ashton Kutcher, skittering between slapstick sitcom and chick-flick parody. As Bridget flings herself back into the fray, besmirching her dignity in klutzy attempts to ski or skydive, one finds it difficult to either laugh at her (as Daniel does) or with her. Where are Fred and Ethel Mertz when they're really needed