Likely we’ve all, at one point or another, been a little bit Bridget Jones. The British heroine, first created by author Helen Fielding for a 1990s newspaper column and then the main character of four novels and four subsequent movies, is perpetually messing up and resolving to do better. She tracks her progress in her diary, meticulously noting what she’s eaten, drunk and smoked (sometimes “v. bad”), excoriating herself for her bad taste in men, nudging herself to be tidier and more organized and more confident and assertive and … well, to be somebody else. This goes for Bridget about as well as it goes for most of us, i.e., not v. well.

When we first met Bridget on screen (played in all of the movies by Renée Zellweger) a quarter-century ago, she was in her early 30s; a “singleton,” juggling the attentions of the sensible barrister Mark Darcy (Colin Firth) and her scoundrel boss, Daniel Cleaver (a brilliantly snakelike Hugh Grant). Now, with the arrival of the movie “Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy” (streaming on Peacock, and based on the 2013 book by Fielding), we’ve come full circle. Bridget, now in her 50s, has two children and has been widowed for four years. Darcy, who turned out to be the love of her life (and whose last name is one of many nods to the Jane Austen universe in this franchise, including a spot-on wet-shirt reference in this latest movie), is gone, and Bridget is still grappling with the enormity of the loss. Despite the vastness of language, she muses in the movie, “the world still struggles to find the right words when someone you love is gone.”

But I approached this film with trepidation, as it is a truth universally acknowledged that the Bridget Jones movies are an uneven lot. The first one, 2001’s “Bridget Jones’s Diary” is a rom-com classic (though its attitudes toward body image and sexual harassment feel dated after nearly 25 years); the second, 2004’s “Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason,” is v. v. bad indeed; the third, “ Bridget Jones’s Baby” from 2016, is surprisingly watchable. What did it mean, I wondered, that “Mad About the Boy,” unlike the others, wasn’t getting a theatrical release in the U.S.? How did Grant’s character recover from death (his funeral opens “Bridget Jones’s Baby,” though I guess they never found his body)? How was it possible that this franchise could have anything further to say?

Sometimes, it’s great to be wrong. “Mad About the Boy” is a charmer, on multiple levels. At its center is Zellweger’s performance; she now wears Bridget as lightly as a breeze. Though the lovable screw-up is still present (somehow we know, when Bridget starts confiding about her sex life at work, that there’s a live mic somewhere), the sad, wine-soaked waif who lip-synched “All By Myself” alone on her couch is now a loving mum, a loyal friend, a devoted daughter. She’s faced an avalanche of grief — both for Mark, and for her father (Jim Broadbent, seen in a sweet flashback) — and yet it’s somehow made her strong. Zellweger still has all of younger Bridget’s trademarks: the little curlicues of sentences, the never-quite-right hair, the perpetual pep talks she seems to be giving herself, punctuated with here-we-go clenched fists. But there’s a calmness to the character now; she’s still a mess, but she’s given herself permission to be a mess. She knows who she is. “Ah well,” Bridget tells herself at one point, “chin up, and onward.”

Looking at “Mad About the Boy” as the final chapter of a long saga, it’s lovely to see the connections to the beginning: Bridget at one point wears (and quickly and rightly abandons) a blouse worn in the first movie. And there are numerous scenes that are deliberate throwbacks: Bridget in bars with her three closest chums (Shirley Henderson, Sally Phillips and James Callis, all gamely reprising their roles from the original); dinner parties with the still-smug marrieds; a New Year’s gathering; a kiss in the snow. Everyone’s older and wiser, even Daniel Cleaver — who isn’t quite reformed, but proves himself to be a splendidly louche godfather to Bridget’s kids (he’s quite good at teaching them how to make cocktails), and a worthy friend in need. And Bridget’s learned a few things about men, knowing when to enjoy a fling and when to find happiness with someone much better suited for her.

And yes, this is how rom-coms are supposed to work, even the ones that take 25 years to unfold. But this particular happy ending for Bridget feels more earned than the others. As someone who’s in Bridget’s approximate age demographic, it felt unexpectedly moving to see her newest chapter — to have grown older with her, and have learned alongside her that in life we are never going to stop making all sorts of mistakes, even ones we thought we’d outgrown, and we’ll endure heartbreaking tragedies and lose loved ones and wonder how we’ll go on — yet somehow, if we gather the right people around us and just keep trying, we’ll be all right in the end, and we might even be happy. We, like Bridget, will endure. And that’s a v. good message, any day.