'Book Club 2: The Next Chapter' (2023) Movie Review

Book Club 2: The Next Chapter is a film directed by Bill Holderman starring the great Diane Keaton, Jane Fonda, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen.

Their names, the only great thing about a movie so sugary that it becomes bland (or even unhealthy).

Movie Review

A movie that starts with a Claudio Coello’s quote (this is a red flag already) and continues as such, giving us a lesson of sugary friendship with nice music and four women who stubbornly tell us, scene after scene, that they still have something to say… but without telling us anything at all during the whole movie.

Book Club 2: The Next Chapter is kind and silly as it can be, it couldn’t be otherwise. The first was a success based on these premises and no wonder that kindness (and silliness) are precisely their vicious weapons for marketing a not at all subtle sequel.

A whole great cast of actors who were great in great films and who now, in this lesser movie, look shrunk. And making a landscape-film, they couldn’t, of course choose any other destination than real Italy.

Even the photography is treated with that telefilm touch and the script is so mid-afternoon that it can’t help but tire us out in just five minutes. The kind and sappy music in the vein of Terms of Endearment doesn’t help (and beware, that one at least had Jack Nicholson playing wild, the best of the movie).

Here not even the prompter “goes wild”: everything has to be topical, kind and suitable only for grandmas (and grandpas) who don’t want surprises in their lives and can’t bear more risks than running out of tea.

Well, nothing, no stirs, no surprises, no identity, lifeless.

No one is to blame, the movie had to be like that, no fun.

Storyline

Four best friends take their book club to Italy for the fun girls’ trip they never had. When things go off the rails and secrets are revealed, their relaxing vacation turns into a once-in-a-lifetime cross-country adventure.