When moviegoers met the charmingly neurotic Bridget Jones (a believably British Renée Zellweger) almost 25 years ago, she was a 32-year-old worried about missing her chance to join the much-vaunted class of women who seemed to have it all. The new Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, which follows a pair of decade-apart sequels, takes place in the aftermath of a tragedy that’s displaced the happy ending she once envisioned for herself. The movie begins four years after her love interest turned husband, Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), was killed in Sudan during a humanitarian mission, leaving her adrift and a single mother of two precocious young children, Billy and Mabel (Casper Knopf and Mila Jankovic), who are getting old enough to notice the void he’s left behind in their lovely Hampstead home.

Killing off Darcy after his and Jones’ messy, slow-burn romance might disappoint franchise fans who’d understandably like to see its chronically frazzled and eminently lovable protagonist enjoy the fruits of what she always wanted. But Mad About the Boy, co-written with obvious affection by Dan Mazer; Abi Morgan; and author Helen Fielding, who wrote the Bridget Jones books the movies are based on, pretty immediately proves that the surprising turn is canny for a movie that regularly tempers the recognizable slapstick humor it eventually gets back in the groove of with genuine, knock-you-over emotion. (I lost track of how many times I got choked up moments after a big laugh.) Mad About the Boy is a gratifyingly mature series anomaly, willing to meander in the confusion of a life reset and more interested in its heroine’s overarching midlife happiness than her romantic prospects.

Read the full column at South Sound.