‘Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy’ Review: Renée Zellweger Charms in What Feels Like a Sweetly Romantic but Mild Finale

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic In the mid-2010s, there was a funny Twitter account called @ModernSeinfeld, which floated ideas for “Seinfeld” episodes as if the show had lasted into the 21st century. (Sample episode: “Jerry’s GF texts in the movies but acts like it’s okay because she sits in the last row.”) At this point, you could almost imagine devising something similar for Bridget Jones, the winsomely discombobulated London singleton who first appeared, in the novel “Bridget Jones’s Diary,” back in 1996.

I’m thinking of potential movie comedies like “Bridget Jones: Love Me Tinder,” “Bridget Jones: Last Brexit to Brooklyn,” and “Bridget Jones’s Old Tweets that Got Her Canceled.” There’s a Tinder reference in the new Bridget Jones movie, “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy,” along with japes about Harry Styles and lip serum that you buy on the dark web (it turns Bridget’s mouth into a faux-Kardashian swollen pucker).

So you can hardly accuse the movie of being fatally out-of-date. The romantic liaison of the title takes place between Bridget, now in her early 50s, and a 29-year-old dreamboat biologist named Roxster (Leo Woodall) — and this, too, is an attempt to make the film au courant, since the real news about this May-December fling is how casual and “Why not?” it seems. (At least he’s not her intern.) That said, I wish “Mad About the Boy” took more aggressive fun in plugging Bridget into the fads and tropes of the present day.

The movie, by design, has a sentimental middle-aged softness to it. It’s the first “Bridget Jones” movie to be released on a streaming platform (in this case, Peacock; that’s right, no theatrical in the U.S.), and it’s also the first one that feels like it belongs there.