Bridget Jones is back with a bump. Is the old chemistry there?

When we last saw Bridget Jones on screen, at the end of The Edge of Reason (2004), Mark Darcy had just proposed. That final scene delivered a promise of commitment at last. Their on-off relationship began in 2001 with the first film, Bridget Jones’s Diary – based on Helen Fielding’s comic creation, originally a newspaper column, then a book.

Set in London and directed by Sharon Maguire, it sees Bridget (Renée Zellweger), who works in publishing, meet Mark (Colin Firth), a divorced human-rights barrister, at a New Year’s Day turkey-curry buffet. Bridget is warm, gaffe-prone, tortured by the size of her thighs; Mark is buttoned-up and terribly serious.

“I like you very much,” he says (translation: “I am in love with you”). But Bridget fancies her boss, Daniel Cleaver (Hugh Grant), a charming scoundrel who promises mini­breaks and great sex.

In The Edge of Reason, the sequel, directed by Beeban Kidron, we find Bridget and Mark having a post-coital hug with his boxer shorts neatly folded by her bed. But this is not a happy conclusion to their tale. It’s more like the beginning of the end.

His formality starts to seem an awful lot like pomposity; his folded boxer shorts start to annoy her. She chucks him, escapes to Thailand with Daniel (who is now employed as a travel presenter by the television channel for which she works) and ends up being saved from a Thai prison by Mark.

Of course, without the right actors neither of the films would have worked. The combination of Zellweger, a Texan with an excellent Home Counties accent and a capacity for physical comedy (“a latter-day Lucille Ball”, according to one critic); Firth, haughty and smouldering (even in a home-made jumper with a reindeer on the front); and Grant, revealing a wickedly seductive darker side, won over audiences.