Film - Philip Kerr on a British formula that has delighted us long enough

Looking at this old-fashioned, relentlessly bourgeois, Giles cartoon of a film, based on Helen Fielding's bestselling book, it is clear that, once again, the alchemists at Working Title Films have been hard at work in the laboratory, trying to rediscover the elusive synthetic formula that created the Edward Hyde-like entity whose breath has stained the celluloid of British film for the past seven years. I am, needless to say, referring to Four Weddings and a Funeral, one of the most successful British movies ever produced, having made more than $244m.

In Bridget Jones's Diary, all the elements of the previous ebullition are here, warmed up once more and bubbling away, pungently: a gemutlich, Dibleyish script by Richard Curtis (among others); an American leading lady in the swollen shape of Renee (Raging Bull) Zellweger; a cynically chosen soundtrack of cheap but potent music; and some Hallmark Christmas-card scenes of Theme Park England, of the kind designed to please those untravelled Americans (George Bush, for example) who are stupid enough to believe that it snows a lot in central London (just like in Oliver), and that anyone with a posh accent must live in a house the size of Castle Howard.

In the preparation of this cloying tincture, the one-trick-pony team who also brought you the cinematic equivalent of Dolly the sheep - the even more successful Notting Hill ($373m) - have thought to provide Zellweger with a circle of brutally honest, prurient friends nearly identical to those who surrounded Hugh Grant in the previous two offerings.

These are the types of friend who all seem to suffer from Tourette's syndrome ("fuck, fuck, fuck"), and who help Curtis create the illusion that this kind of comedy is youthful and anarchic, as opposed to dated and conservative. The mechanics of the Friends formula are perhaps at their most apparent in the socially maladroit dinner-party scene that occurs in all three films; and once you understand how the trick is worked, the performance becomes as dull and predictable as watching Paul Daniels saw Debbie McGee in half.

Sitting through Bridget Jones's Diary, which already has the air of a cheesy BBC film for Christmas Day back in 1996, you might easily imagine that John Major was still prime minister and that women still accepted the sad delusion that Mr Darcy, as played by Colin Firth in the telly version of Pride and Prejudice, is the last word in masculine sex appeal. I have nothing against the character of Mr Darcy, or indeed Firth. It is merely that I feel he has - to borrow a nicely ironic phrase of Mr Bennett's, when putting a stop to his daughter Mary's weak and affected singing performance - "delighted us long enough".

I am not sure exactly how much the producers at Working Title - Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner - paid Helen Fielding for rights to the book; one hears rumours of millions, and I have no doubt they are true. Yet the diary itself plays only a perfunctory role in the film, bookending the beginning and the end of a plot that appears lifted entirely from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. And it must occur to every semi-literate person who sees this unreal, almost schizophrenic film, that Working Title might have saved themselves a great deal of money if they had simply produced a bowdlerised version of Jane Austen's classic novel and had done with it. Doubtless, they and Fielding would argue that it was an act of homage. Let it be so. But I call this empty and insincere act of homage a homage to catatonia.

I can see how they might also have saved a great deal of money on their leading lady, Renee Zellweger. She contrives to sound like Dawn French and, in her Method/De Niro-inspired effort to pile on the pounds, so as to look plausibly Jones-like, it would seem that she wished to look like French, too. Instead, Zellweger's extra chins and hamster face merely make her the twin of Michelle Fowler (Susan Tully) in BBC's EastEnders. I doubt that the film would have looked very much different by having Tully play the Pooterish diarist, and several million dollars might have been saved from the Bridget budget - or, at least, enough to pay for a decent director. Sharon Maguire, with only one shot in her Chad Valley viewfinder - she must have thought she was directing a silent movie, there are so many gurning close-ups in this film - gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "locked-off camera".

Still, it was nice to find Hugh Grant back on such good form. With everyone playing caricatures instead of characters, Grant's greater experience in this field enabled him easily to outclass the rest of the cast. Honestly, he is the best thing in the film, and even Maguire's wooden direction - so wooden she makes Ed Wood look like Stanley Kubrick's smarter brother - could not detract from his obvious star quality and screen charisma.

Four Weddings and a Funeral was excellent but, none the less, a happy accident. With the frankly tedious Notting Hill, the Working Title trio of Bevan, Fellner and Curtis was already pushing its luck; and yet, somehow, against the evidence of everyone's eyes and ears, it managed to pull off the same trick. This third, genetically engineered offering might just turn out to be a Bridget too far.

Bridget Jones's Diary (15) is on general release

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