‘Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy’ doesn’t quite hit the mark in the way that the original, ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’ did in 2001, which had a razor-sharp quality to the writing, with the relationship pitfalls into which the eponymous Bridget fell something that all of us could relate to – even if most of us never quite get to choose between a barrister and a book publisher. This time around, the series is wrapped up in a way that suggests this really will be the last entry in the series, although this time Colin Firth and Hugh Grant are relegated to supporting roles – more of a cameo in the case of Firth – while Bridget’s relationship choices are relocated to that of a park attendant who is two and a half decades her junior and the science teacher at her children’s posh prep school.

We know from the trailer that Bridget’s husband, Mr. Darcy (Firth), has died while on a human rights mission in Sudan, and now Bridget lives in an impossibly big and expensive house in north London and whose children get to have the slightly more grown up cad Daniel Cleaver (Grant) to babysit for them when their mother is invited out for drinks. Bridget is as ditzsy as ever, and gets to return to her role as a TV producer while her friends set her up on Tinder. There are plenty of so-so gags about how it has been so long now since Bridget last had sex that her vagina will reseal itself and that she is effectively now a nun.

This is a Bridget who is now firmly living in an online world, where ‘ghosting’ becomes a phenomenon that directly applies to her predicament with a young suitor who seems just too perfect, only for him to disappear and not answer her texts. Grant is genuinely funny in the short time he is on screen, but there are only so many references to his penchant for manufacturing ‘dirty bitch cocktails’ for Bridget’s pre-teen children. That said, Cleaver gets a character arc that we haven’t seen before, even down to a brush with mortality that is far deeper than anything we saw from him in the predecessors in this series. ‘Mad About The Boy’, which ends with the screening of clips from the original, has come full arc, and what we have is a sense of closure.

Grief punctuates this film, lending a sense of pathos to its more prankish elements (with Bridget and her children stuck up a tree or buying condoms in the pharmacist while her children’s science teacher is watching), and this final instalment both amplifies and subverts the dynamic that lay at the heart of all the previous films where we assumed that Bridget was congenitally incapable of falling in love with anyone other than Mr. Darcy. Here, whomsoever Bridget chooses to spend the rest of her life with, or even if she ends up alone, we see that the relationship endures through her children and her loyal set of friends or, ghost-like, from beyond the grave.