Where the earlier Bridget had been merely desperate, now she is desperate and rather chillingly self-abasing. And she is also, obviously, far more explicitly antifeminist than she was circa 1998....For Bridget Jones to be a recognizable parody of contemporary female experience (as she is almost universally held to be) she has to have some coherent center to her character instead of the makeshift and feeble caricature of womanly self-preoccupation we encounter in THE EDGE OF REASON.