Film reviews: Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy | Heart Eyes | To a Land Unknown | Memoir of a Snail

The latest in the Bridget Jones franchise underuses the talented cast, preferring lame gags over character development

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (15)

★★☆☆☆

Heart Eyes (18)

Renée Zellweger and Leo Woodall in Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy

★☆☆☆☆

To a Land Unknown (15)

★★★★☆

Memoir of a Snail (15)

To a Land Unkown is a complex character study that pays homage to Midnight Cowboy

★★★☆☆

It’s strange to go back to the original Bridget Jones’s Diary. Full of wince-inducing gags and shrug-it-off sexism, it offers a pretty revealing snapshot of the confused, post-feminist world into which it was released in 2001. That it’s still funny in places is also a tribute to the astute casting of Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant and Colin Firth. Intuitively understanding their characters from the off, their willingness to subvert – or in the case of Firth, slyly exploit – their respective screen personae helped them transcend the material.

Sadly, as with the two subsequent sequels, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy shows how weak that material really is. With too few contributions from Grant’s caddish Daniel Cleaver, and Firth’s noble Darcy relegated to a treacly spectral cameo following his off-screen death, it’s left to Zellweger to bring life to a movie that burdens Bridget with jokes that wouldn’t cut it in a 90s’ sitcom.

Set four years on from the death of Darcy, the film revolves around Bridget getting back on the dating scene after retreating into a prolonged grief spiral, one filled with nights in watching Netflix and days spent tending the daily chaos of mothering two children. Enter Leo Woodall’s ridiculously named Roxter, a hunky 29-year-old student who works part-time for the parks department and one day rescues Bridget’s children (and Bridget) from a tree. A few weeks of texting and sexting later and Bridget is getting her first shag since her husband died, a momentous event the film celebrates by having her show up to work the next day with her hair mussed up.

Adam Elliot uses his grungy animation style to explore mental illness in Memoir of a Snail

Though Woodall has chemistry with Zellweger, the film seems oddly coy about the age difference. Instead of normalising it, it plays to all the toy-boy stereotypes, with director Michael Morris even riffing on that 1992 ‘Mad About the Boy’ Levi’s advert (itself a riff on the Burt Lancaster film The Swimmer) with a slow-motion swimming pool sequence that enables Bridget’s friends to gawp at her new beau’s dripping-wet physique. Alas, there’s never any doubt about how this relationship will pan out: it’s clear from the start the film is setting up her kids’ new teacher, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, as a more age-appropriate Darcy replacement.

Here, the film wastes yet another good actor by not giving him a character to play, just a series of comedy ticks. Indeed, it’s telling that only when Grant shows up does the film manage to generate any actual laughs or genuine emotion. For all Daniel Cleaver’s surface absurdities, Grant makes him a rounded character and, in their moments together, Zellweger does the same with Bridget. Too bad the filmmakers didn’t make this last hurrah for the character about this instead.

A charitable summary of the new horror rom-com Heart Eyes — about an emoji-faced killer who targets couples on Valentine’s Day — might liken it to a mirthless cross between Scream and 10 Things I Hate About You. A more accurate comparison, however, would be Scary Movie meets Date Movie. A parody of a parody of a parody, it’s a film so devoid of self-awareness about its own efforts to be self-aware that it doesn’t even know where the tropes its trying to make fun of originated. Consequently, it’s a rubbish slasher movie and an even worse rom-com.

Set in Athens against the backdrop of the immigration crisis, To a Land Unknown gives us a street-level view of the ways desperation hardens into criminality via a compassionate story of two Palestinian refugee cousins doing what it takes to make a better life for themselves. Charismatic newcomer Mahmood Bakri takes the lead as Chatila, whose modest dream of opening a cafe in Germany is complicated by his efforts to keep his more vulnerable junkie cousin Reda (Aram Sabbah) off drugs long enough to raise funds for passports and plane tickets. When they meet a young Palestinian boy who’s been dumped in Athens by a smuggler, their plan to help him reach Italy inspires Chatila to embark on a morally compromised scheme to get himself and Reda out of the country too. Debut Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel smartly structures this as a thriller, but gradually deepens it into a complex character study, one that pays explicit homage to Midnight Cowboy, but also manages to indict the wider system without making excuses for his characters’ actions.

Oscar-nominated for best animated feature, Australian stop-motion maverick Adam Elliot’s new film Memoir of a Snail is sad tale about a lonely woman (voiced by Succession star Sarah Snook) reflecting on a life so unrelentingly bleak it almost feels like a misery memoir. Narrated in a depressive deadpan style that purposely flattens any moments of potential levity, it’s an acquired taste, a sincere attempt by Elliot to use his grungy animation style to explore mental illness. Unlike his earlier film, Mary and Max, the results feel more strained, even if the animation is typically inventive.

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy is in cinemas from 13 February; Heart Eyes, To a Land Unknown and Memoir of a Snail are in cinemas from 14 February