"The question is what happens AFTER you walk off into the sunset," is the poser Bridget Jones (Zellweger) is fretting over after snaring Mark Darcy (Firth).

On the plus side, there's been a romantically-blissful six weeks of seventy-one "ecstatic shags" with the mega-mannered human rights lawyer.

But on the downside, Bridget still needs a calculator to calorie count and feels ill-at-ease in Darcy's world of soaring legal eagles and black-tie dinners.

Also hoving back into view at her own TV station is silver-tongued cad Daniel Cleaver (Grant) while Bridget feels Mark and his gamine assistant Rebecca (Jacinda Barrett) may be more than just friends.

This sees Bridget morphing from the singleton thirty-something to a brasher cartoon figure akin to a rom-com superheroine.

Where she once gamely slithered down a fireman's pole (don't titter) she now leaps out of an airplane for a bit of (reluctant) skydiving and finds herself downhill skiing in an Alpine resort.

Thankfully, Zellweger - despite the writ-large nature of the character - still captures the little (or not so little) girl-lost's innate vulnerability married to a devil-may-care exuberance.

It helps that Bridget is also a fundamentally decent person, albeit cursed with the afflictions of modern living - a cigarette and drink habit and terminal insecurity.

Firth does what he's supposed to do as the indulgent but slightly pompous love interest while Grant further fine tunes his Terry Thomas out of Roger Moore routine as Carver.

Bridget's pals - sweary Shazzer (Sally Phillips), conspiratorial Jude (Shirley Henderson) and camp Tom (James Callis) - are now amusingly destabilising Bridget rather than encouraging her to stick with Darcy.

Director Beeban Kidron welds the whole thing together with a light touch and a sublimely handled couple of comedy setpieces.

Particularly strong is a legal quiz show at a pompous law association dinner where Bridget comes into her own with the Footballer's Wives and Madonna questions.

There's a few too many cheesy love songs and a detour to Thailand to be incarcerated in five-star version of the Bangkok Hilton doesn't really work.

However, there are enough turbo-charged faux pas and some superb comedy playing to make it reason enough to open Bridget's diary for a second time.

Tim Evans