Twenty-four years after the release of Bridget Jones and nine years since its last film, Bridget Jones’s Baby, Bridget returns for what will undoubtedly be the last film in the series, and thankfully, it’s a heartfelt and charming return.

Bridget Jones has two children she loves, but she has been left with a hole in her life, as Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) was killed while on a mission in Sudan. Now, three years later, she’s juggling looking after son Billy and younger daughter Mabel, all the while barely living herself. Answers to her depression come in the form of many ideas: her friend group suggest getting laid, of course, while the doctor’s suggestion is to get back out into the workforce. Bridgett may have found the man to fill what she’s missing when she meets the much younger and attractive Roxster (Leo Woodall), but it couldn’t be as simple as that.

There are almost two sides to Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, with one half attempting to give fans the awkward Bridgett romances and moments that fans have come to expect, while the other is a tender film dealing with loss and how to move on. It’s not just Bridgett either, as her son struggles with the idea of another man in his mother’s life and the idea of moving on himself. The fear of forgetting his father scares him, and science classes at school give him no hope for any sort of beyond that his father could exist in. There’s a shared moment with Bridgett and Billy towards the final moments of the film that’s one of the best in all four of these films, as it manages to conceptualize a euphoric moment of “moving on” in one of the best I’ve seen in a film–an odd thing to say for a Bridgett Jones film, in all honesty, but also true.

There’s still plenty of laughs to be had in the film, with the highlights being Bridgett using some black-market lip-enhancer that could only be sold as ‘look like Kim Kharadian in an instance,’ and there’s plenty of fun to be had with the return of Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant). Announced dead at the start of Bridget Jones Baby and revealed as alive in the credits, Grant here isn’t missing a beat, as he delivers the same type of dialogue to Bridgett that would usually end in a slap to the face for anyone else, but for him, and her, you can tell all of it’s a term of endearment now. Even Daniel Cleaver gets his own sub-plot about growing up in the final film, which I was sort of shocked to see, given how he’s been written as unredeemable in the past two films he was featured in.

There’s an un-evenness to Bridget Jones: Mad About The Boy, and the romance with Roxster was my least favourite part of the narrative, but for everything else it gets right, this is a laugh-out-loud and often a tender film that was great to watch with an audience in the cinema, a choice not all of the world gets as it goes straight to streaming on Peacock–a win for Australian cinema-goers for once.