BOOK CLUB: THE NEXT CHAPTER - Mark Reviews Movies

Book Club: The Next Chapter, Focus Features

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 11, 2023

The basic premise of Book Club: The Next Chapter more or less mirrors what must have been the experience of filming it. There's a pleasant simplicity to that, even if returning screenwriters Bill Holderman (also coming back as director) and Erin Simms don't entirely trust it.

This is a mostly unnecessary sequel to the 2018 comedy about a group of older women who find their lives, relationships, and outlooks on life altered over the course of reading an allegedly sexy series of books. If there was any enjoyment to be found amidst the strained gags of that movie, it existed within the casting of the four leads and the easy rapport among them.

Holderman and Simms smartly double down on that quality, creating a scenario that only serves the purpose of putting these four characters together for an extended period of time, away from their ordinary lives, their loves, their families, their problems, and, yes, even and for some reason their shared appreciation for reading and learning some lessons along the way. In a strange way, that this sequel essentially ignores the hook of its predecessor might be for the best. Regardless of whatever book they might have chosen for the sequel, it seems unlikely that these thinly drawn characters would have anywhere to go or any more room to grow. Within the constraints of the sort of situational comedy the filmmakers have embraced, there's very little room for change.

Hence, there's a bit of freedom to the sequel that the first movie didn't possess. That the filmmakers use it for a string of familiar, repetitive jokes and an eventual plot filled with far too many complications for something so laid-back is unfortunate, if unfortunately predictable, too.

When we last left the four friends, things had changed as drastically as they can for them within a story that mainly revolved around their relationships with men. Life-long bachelorette Vivian (Jane Fonda) had found true love—again—with Arthur (Don Johnson). The widowed Diane (Diane Keaton) had opened her heart again for Mitchell (Andy Garcia), and divorced Sharon (Candice Bergen) had taken to online dating to look for love—but, apparently, has since discovered casual sex along the way. The contentedly married Carol (Mary Steenburgen) re-ignited the spark with husband Bruce (Craig T. Nelson).

Really, very little of this—and none of the story threads involving any other characters from the first movie—matters in this one. On a whim, Arthur has proposed—again—to Vivian, who has accepted this time around. Following the isolation of the recent pandemic, the four four-decades-long friends reunite in person and decide to throw their pal a bachelorette trip to Italy.

The rest of the movie follows Vivian, Diane, Sharon, and Carol on that trip—from Rome, to Venice, to Tuscany. More to the point, though, we get to follow Fonda, Keaton, Bergen, and Steenburgen on that same trip, as the four actors look as if they're having the loveliest of times with each other—soaking in the sights, drinking a lot of Prosecco, joking and laughing with each other. Who needs a plot when you have that setup?

There is an answer to that mostly rhetorical question. Unfortunately, it's the makers of this movie, who see but don't fully comprehend the gifts they have right in front of them.

For a while, the movie is just these four characters being tourists, having a good time at restaurants and museums and historical sites, and just appreciating the idea of being together after so much has happened to them and the world. If it seems as if we've been inundated with movies about the experience of living through the pandemic that were made during it, here is what's sure to be one of the early portends of things to come: movies about people going to extremes to live it up after the fact by way of filmmakers going out of their way to show the actors living it up.

In this case, we get to watch the four actors admire Renaissance art, travel by way of boat through the canals of Venice (One character gets to have even more fun in a boat), and marvel at how every street in Rome is impossibly beautiful. If the national tourism board of Italy didn't have some hand in the production of this movie, it's the best free advertising a country could hope to have, since even the few things that go wrong, mostly because the characters are naïve, are cleared up quite easily by the end.

The early part of this process is kind of enjoyable, if only because, yes, the setting is beautiful and the actors probably can't hide what a fun time they're having at work. All of this has its limits, though, and the innuendo-filled jokes of Book Club: The Next Chapter hit a wall pretty quickly. The same goes for the nicely absent plot, which arrives with the vengeance of stolen luggage, missing human remains, a car that breaks down in the middle of nowhere, a trip to jail, and, not one, but two wedding ceremonies. Never let that much plot get in the way of easy fun.

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