RENEE Zellweger has porked up again, stuffed-shirt Colin Firth and handsome cad Hugh Grant are back, and so are the jokes about big bums and dodgy Christmas jumpers, and Bridget's three comic stooges.

The only surprise is the choice of director, the formerly radical Beeban Kidron, best known for the lesbian TV drama Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.

She reasons that Bridget is innocent and wicked and not politically correct, the stuff of a feelgood movie. "And why not," she says, as her ultimate excuse for what amounts to nothing more than a flatulent re-make of the over-rated Bridget Jones's Diary.

Hapless Bridget's diary picks up at the start of a new year. Our confessional anti-heroine is still a TV journalist, still concerned about her weight (she should be more worried about the all the excess flab in the dialogue), but no longer single. Instead, at 32, she is fretting over keeping her boyfriend, human rights lawyer Mark Darcy (Firth).

Awkward Bridget emerges as a Frank Spencer character: putting her mouth or foot in it, whether upsetting bald Tories at Darcy's Law Society dinner, landing in a pig pen after a parachute jump or skiing with spectacular incompetence. If it were not for Zellweger's gift for physical comedy and sense of comic timing (and perfectly middle-class English Home Counties accent), The Edge Of Reason would founder even more on its surfeit of slapstick. Her magic mushroom scene in Thailand's seas, flabby exposed midriff, beaming smile, gibberish and all, is an original joy amid so much regurgitation.

The story struggles to accommodate anything more than cameos for Bridget's fawning friends (Sally Phillips merely reprises her serial swearing) or her parents (the laconic Jim Broadbent steals his all too few scenes). English social satire makes way for broad comedy and crass scenes in a Thailand jail after Bridget is busted for possessing drugs.

Firth grits his teeth, showing little enthusiasm for his humourless character or the inevitable fight with his love rival, Grant's suave Daniel Cleaver. Plodding along like Bridget's behind, the film only sparkles in the presence of Grant's bounder. Once more he has the best lines, or rather, he has a self-regarding way with them: somehow letting on that he knows he is far better than his surroundings while making every line shine.

Memo to Bridget: The Edge Of Reason is a Bridget too far.

Updated: 16:17 Thursday, November 11, 2004