Directed By Bill Holderman

Starring – Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen, Diane Keaton

The Plot – Follows the new journey of four best friends (Fonda, Steenburgen, Keaton, Candice Bergen) as they take their book club to Italy for the fun girls trip they never had.

Rated PG-13 for some strong adult language and suggestive material

BOOK CLUB: THE NEXT CHAPTER – Official Trailer [HD] – Only In Theaters May 12 – YouTube

POSITIVES

Like the movie’s leading lady protagonists, the film effortlessly immerses us in the atmospheric ambiance of the Italian culture, with a rich blend of intoxicating imagery and geographically distinct soundtrack choices that fully enrich the element of the sequel’s switch-up in setting. Cinematographer Andrew Dunn does have an easy job in articulating the beauty and vibrancy of this mostly on-site romantic destination, but aside from the imagery it’s the way Dunn frames matters that is most integral to the engagement, capitalizing on the sun-baked scenery with a variety of angles that feels like it leaves no stone unturned, and when combined with the aforementioned merits of familiar American pop tracks realized through the Italian language, fully engulfs us in the grandeur of the gimmick, which permeate consistently throughout the film’s 102 minute run time. On that allowance of screen time, the film’s brisk pacing is also vital in maintaining urgency in the narrative, especially when its script crams so many character beats and set pieces into the duration of the experience. Not everything works creatively or naturally in tow, as I will get to in a second, but the film manages to miraculously evade boredom despite so many things unnaturally working against it, serving as a testament to the chemistry of its leads, which continuously manages to coax its audience into investing in the many untimely mishaps that plague their once in a lifetime getaway. On the subject of those performances, each of the fabulous four here gives their all in triggering the unshakeable bond in chemistry that permeates seamlessly within their lived-in brand of interactions, giving the film a subtle branding of tenderness and sentimentality that works terrifically with Holderman’s emphasis in direction towards each of them being the virtual safety net for the other, with ample instances for each of them to convey the unrestrained mayhem within their aged adolescence.

NEGATIVES

Unfortunately, “Book Club: The Next Chapter” fails to maintain consistency in even the most basic beats of expectations, leaving it an uninspired addition not only to over-the-hill comedies of the past decade, but also to a superior predecessor, which on its merits was as mediocre as mundance can conjure. For starters, the effectiveness of the humor this time around is much more inconsistent, with a doubling down on juvenile gags and on-the-nose puns in dialogue that don’t come across as natural or endearing to the creativity of its set-ups, or the ladies from which they spawned from. Part of the problem certainly stems from the predictability of the obvious set-ups, with emphasis being laid heavily on certain words and phrases to elicit a juvenile gag reflex, but for my money the bigger problem resides in the lack of pizazz with the punchlines themselves, which embarassingly unravel with the kind of flat landing that often elicits laughter purely from the actresses unloading them, leading to a complete lack of confidence or connection to the audience they’re catering towards. In addition to this, the film feels void of any long-term conflict to the direction of its storytelling and respective characters, with only spontaneous bursts of temporarily pocketed adversity that seems restrained towards deviating from an otherwise predictably bland screenplay. In addition to this, the book club gimmick which the story was founded on feels as irrelevant as ever, with it only being mentioned as a crutch during the Covid-influenced introduction, and then dropped completely. This brash of inconsistency carries over to the imbalance of character development, with Keaton’s Diane (Genius naming there) feeling the victim in a lack of a creativity that she dominated from during the first installment, and here just kind of stands around and reacts to the crazy things happening around her. Getting away from the script, some technical hinderances created more than a few glaring distractions in the returns of my investment, with strange green-screen and overzealous editing influencing what was otherwise some basic moments of interaction. The former happens during some big Venician backdrops, which tells me the budget didn’t fully pay for the extensive on-site shooting, and the ladder seems primed for filler whenever an actress delivers a punchline, leading me to believe that extra stock footage was used to suppress an actress collapsing with laughter in between. It leaves so many of these basic moments feeling smothered by outsider influence, and in turn leads to more than few moments of glaring continuity issues between character placements and reactions from one cut to the next that simply doesn’t add up. Lastly, while I did expect predictability from a film that feels like it could easily share a universe with so many other over-the-hill comedies, I didn’t expect the film to address this aspect with a twist ending so dull on impact that it created more leaps in logic than lapses in conventionalism. It’s one of those endings that’s a bit of a cop-out on the growth of a particular character, despite the message warranting some redeeming social commentary, and in a movie that isn’t made for surprises in the first place, just leaves the ending of the film feeling unnecessarily drawn out to slightly deviate from where we would eventually end up at anyway.

OVERALL
“Book Club: The Next Chapter” is at the very least watchable because of its decorated diva ensemble, but as an entertaining page-turner falls far from the shelf of its mediocre predecessor, which at least elicited a few laughs to the overwhelming predictability. Here, the returns are remarkably slim, leaving the geriatrics with a limitless juvenile joke-book that they never move on from, and us an exercise in futility of having to hear Grandma discuss her sexual prowess.

My Grade: 4/10 or D