'Bridget Jones': Mad About the Boy' review: Welcome back!

WHAT IT'S ABOUT Renée Zellweger returns to her signature role in "Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy," the fourth installment in a film series that stretches back to 2001.

Four years after the death of her husband Mark Darcy (Colin Firth, who shows up as an apparition now and again), Bridget is a single parent to son Billy (Casper Knopf) and daughter Mabel (Mila Jankovic). 

It's a busy but lonely life. But after some prodding, Bridget returns to work and gets back out in the dating world. She finds herself once more torn between two men: the decades-younger Roxster (Leo Woodall) and Mr. Wallaker (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who teaches at the kids' school.

Hugh Grant and Emma Thompson, reprising their roles from earlier movies, round out the cast. The director is Michael Morris, a TV veteran ("Better Call Saul").

MY SAY The world has changed a lot since Bridget Jones first appeared on screen, but at least one constant remains. There aren't many parts that more perfectly match an actor and a character.

Zellweger understands this person so completely that she never seems to do anything but thoroughly inhabit her. There's no detectable acting, per se. It's as if we're catching up with an old friend, someone experiencing the highs and lows and joys and defeats of life in sync with the rest of us.

The star has become so connected with the character that one can lose sight of just how good of a performance she keeps giving.

That's true even as the movie, an adaptation of series author Helen Fielding's 2013 novel, sometimes struggles to give Zellweger enough to do. The picture is too long — there's one dancing scene too many — and the stakes can seem a bit too low. 

It also has a tendency to lay things on too heavily, as when Dinah Washington's take on "Mad About the Boy" plays on the soundtrack while Roxster dives into a pool to rescue a dog.

But whenever things threaten to really tilt toward the inconsequential, the movie simply leans on the charisma and gravitas of its star.

In Zellweger's hands, Bridget is a kind and smart person, but also a deeply vulnerable one. She's always trying to be the best possible version of herself, and, like the rest of us, frequently coming up short.

The actor perfectly blends the lighter and more comic moments with the serious ones, and this time around she captures the feeling of the weight of grief years later, when it's dulled to a new but constant normal.

You leave it all with the sense that there's a lot left to the Bridget Jones story, and there's something welcome and comforting about that, even all these years later.

BOTTOM LINE The "Bridget Jones" series might not have the scale or the heft of some of the other movie franchises that have spanned decades, but that doesn't make it any less notable.