Book Club: The Next Chapter wears out its tired gimmick quickly
When you have four enormously talented actors, don’t trap them in a tired script with no life.
When the sequel to 2018 movie Book Club opens with a Paulo Coelho quote from The Alchemist, you know you’re in trouble.
Often cited by that awkward colleague as their favourite book, Coelho’s best-selling novel is the Hallmark equivalent of philosophical enlightenment. So, any movie that entwines its thematic ambitions to The Alchemist is going to have as much depth as a doggie pool.
Starring the properly impressive roster of Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, Diane Keaton and Mary Steenburgen, the original film wasted their collective talents with a trite and generic script. This follow-up does the same, but with the stunning backdrop of Italy.
Is that a trade-up? Almost.
If you somehow missed the eyeroll-experience of the original, the 2018 film was about four lifelong friends reconnecting with themselves romantically and sexually. Now, five years on and with one covid pandemic in between, the four have reunited in person.
The headstrong Vivian (Fonda) is about to marry Arthur (Don Johnson), the former flame she hooked up with at the end of the previous movie. Carol (Steenburgen) is fretting over husband Bruce’s (Craig T. Nelson) health, Diane (Keaton) is settling in with not-so-new-love Mitchell (Andy Garcia) and Sharon (Bergen) retired from her judgeship.
After a bit cajoling, Carol convinces the group that they need to take that girls’ trip to Italy they had planned and abandoned decades ago. And Vivian’s pending nuptials is the perfect excuse – it’ll be a hens’ holiday.
In all fairness, there is a lulling delight to watching the quartet traipse through gorgeous Italian sights, standing in front of the Spanish Steps while decked out in fabulous outfits, or driving through the Tuscan countryside, or whizzing down the canals of Venice.
Book Club: The Next Chapter is a travel agent’s (remember those?) dream. There is little chance your itchy feet won’t be tapping out of the cinema with plans of bucatini and ancient ruins.
It’s Sex And The City crossed with The Golden Girls crossed with The Sisterhood Of The Travelling Pants – but without any of the wit.
This sequel is dragged down by the same thing as the original, just on a more picturesque scale. The script is flat, and the writing is inane.
We’re supposed to believe these are the dearest of friends and while certainly close mates have a shorthand developed over years that doesn’t require a lot of expository dialogue, writer/director Bill Holderman and writer Erin Simms don’t seem to work in complete scenes – they barely work in complete sentences.
Almost every verbal exchange consists of pithy one-liners about ageing. And that’s it. One hour and 48 minutes of tired jokes about being old. The gimmick wears out quickly. Especially as we’d already deja’d this vu five years ago.
Yes, Book Club: The Next Chapter is frothy and occasionally diverting, and Bergen, Fonda, Keaton and Steenburgen are truly marvellous in general. Their screen presence can never really be tamped down by a trifling script.
But the film is as lightweight and cheesy as The Alchemist.
Rating: 2/5
Book Club: The Next Chapter is in cinemas now
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