Rent Book Club: The Next Chapter (2023)

Book Club: The Next Chapter (aka Book Club 2: The Next Chapter) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

Compared to the first Book Club movie, The Next Chapter is more on track, and that track is one for a passive old-lady comedy. It’s styled as more of a vacation romance for the foursome ensemble and plays about as sappy and safely silly as one might expect for this type of film. So, if you’ve got the gals together with lots of wine and want to delight in some aged actresses just having fun, you’ll probably get what you expect from this premise. Here’s hoping the wine is strong enough not to pay too much attention to the by-the-numbers plot.

Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen, and Mary Steenburgen return for more good-natured and weakly-witty fun. While enduring the COVID-19 pandemic, the ladies' club vows to do something big when they can all get together again. Having previously put a trip to Italy on hold, they do so by throwing a bachelorette party for Vivian (Fonda), who intends to marry her fiance Arthur (Don Johnson). They have fun in Italy, experiencing all the food, drinks, and sights with simple bits of comedy strewn throughout. But problems arise: they lose their luggage, and a surprise wedding plan is turned on its head as the three ladies have to find a way to get to Vivian’s wedding on time.

The film is less chaotic than the last movie since this is a very lightweight road trip movie. The four all-star actresses are all likable in this plot and it seems like their joy comes about reasonably quickly. Of course, nothing is demanding from them in this script. There’s no wild side to them having to dance at a bar for bus fare or push a car out of a dirty ditch for some slapstick humor. They also encounter the nicest of people who are more than willing to offer some help when the chips are down. It’s a world so grotesquely upbeat that it makes me angry this isn’t the way the world can be for everybody. Who wouldn’t want a fun trip to Italy where a road trip mishap only leads to fun scenarios of romantically making dough?

But much like the previous Book Club movie and similar films like 80 For Brady, this film feels more like watching a handful of celebrities go on vacation and kinda-sorta string a plot together through it all. All the characters have stuff to do, but it’s primarily busy work to get them from joke-setting-A to joke-setting-B. The film walks a fine line between being a low-stakes, meandering all-girl vacation and a routine dose of Boomer-humor romance, played off with the most timid of cuteness. It’s not that Keaton, Fonda, Bergen, and Steenburgen are bad actors; they’re great actors who served up a nothing script. Their line deliveries are so great that I’m incredibly frustrated nobody wrote something better for them. Why even write anything for this trip to Italy? Why not make this film like The Trip, where the actors more or less get to riff on their travels of wining and dining? That’d be a lot more compelling than a ho-hum wedding scenario.

Book Club: The Next Chapter is as predictable as expected for this type of film. It’s great actresses cavorting in a simple yet tired road trip plot that is so passive the ensemble could sleepwalk through this film, and they mostly do. The best thing to be said about this type of comedy is that it is inoffensive to pay it no mind when Grandma or the gals flip it on for some lightweight comedy. The only annoying thing about this type of film is that these four women are underutilized and probably drinking more wine than I am while watching this. Oh, well. At least Bergen still has some dry wit, even if she turns it to a low setting for this adventure.