The scatty, endearingly plump singleton with a troubled love life is ready for a big slice of the box-office pie. Movies such as Polar Express may get all the hype now but Bridget Jones thinks she knows where she stands in the overcrowded markets.

For Bridget Jones: The Edge Of Reason, starring Oscar-winner Renee Zellweger in the title role, arrives in America a week before its scheduled opening on November 19.

The new movie, made for about $50 million, is a sequel to Bridget Jones's Diary that grossed over $280 million worldwide in 2001. It will open at some 500 theaters on November 12 and then add on 2,000 theaters a week later.

The film has just been released in England to a smash opening, overlooking some critical drubbing that said it repeated many gags and lacked spontaneity.

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'In this sequel to the successful 2001 single-girl-in-the-city comedy... more is less,' declared Hollywood Reporter. The new film 'begins by repeating many gags from the previous film. Only now they feel lame and routine.'

And yet many box-office experts expect the sequel to rake in far more than its predecessor. 

In a statement, Nikki Rocco, Universal Pictures' President of Distribution, cited the "tremendous response" from audiences in announcing the new release date.

As with the first, the new film comes from an international bestseller novel by Helen Fielding organized as a diary by Bridget.

It picks up two months after the end of Bridget Jones's Diary. We will find Bridget is married to Mark Darcy (Colin Firth), the human-rights lawyer she bagged at the end of the previous film after she had rejected the cad Daniel (Hugh Grant).

The romance is slowly cooling off, though Bridget is still wondering how she managed to get him. She is overcome by self-doubt and anxiety. But as she tries to impress Darcy, she winds up in a series of clumsy misadventures. Some are funny, and some, like her sojourn in a Thai prison, aren't.

The trouble in Thailand results from Bridget, after a serious disagreement with Darcy, going to Bangkok on a journalistic assignment. Her former boyfriend Daniel is with her but she feels more for Darcy than ever. However, just as she gets ready to fly back home, she gets busted for drug possession.

But this being a comedy, everything has to end on a pleasant note.

Whatever negativity London reviewers uttered about the new film, there was hardly a whisper against Zellweger's performance.

The British press has been full of stories of Zellweger doing the stunts, and not all of them were easy. Director Beeban Kidron said she had hired stunt doubles to help Zellweger with the misadventure scenes, but the actress insisted on doing many of them herself.

'She goes careening down the slope backward, with her bum in the air, and beautifully falls over at the feet of the other characters,' Kidron told the New York Post about a tricky and rather dangerous skiing episode.

Some may think Zellweger's feat of gaining 30 pounds each time for the two movies, aided admirably by French toast, cheesecakes and milkshakes, was no small stunt either.