Cinema: Book Club sequel lacklustre and unconvincing

Probably it’s best to judge a film by the laughter all around you. And in an era of painfully thin cinema audiences, there was plenty of people and plenty of laughter for this one.

In fairness, by the end, despite its gush, Book Club: The Next Chapter just about manages to win you round – a sweet film about finding love, keeping love and expressing love. And there’s not much wrong with that. But in truth, the film pitches at the level of pleasantly watchable and pretty much stays there, an undemanding film, rather undermined by the fact that the key character are, well… pretty annoying actually with their girly-squealing and tough-love talking.

This is a sequel which bills itself as highly anticipated. And maybe it is for some people. All I know is that I definitely saw the first one and can’t remember a thing about it.

But the gist is that our four life-long friends are back together – Vivian (Jane Fonda), Diane (Diane Keaton), Sharon (Candice Bergen) and Carol (Mary Steenburgen) – having variously survived the lockdowns with their various Zoomy communications and projects. They are now re-emerging – and re-emerging with a big difference. After a lifetime avoiding marriage, Vivian announces that she is engaged. And that’s the prompt, with various other stars aligning in the constellation, for the elderly girls to head off for a bachelorette trip to Italy. They quickly lose all their luggage – but never seem remotely inconvenienced. Instead, it’s all the cue for some gorgeous shots of Rome, some stunning views of Venice and some lovely landscapes as they head for Tuscany. It’s a beautiful film to watch. But there’s an odd falseness to it throughout. The girls just don’t seem to have the chemistry you’d expect to find between friends of 50-plus-years standing. Their conversations never quite manage the naturalness that ought to flow. And despite the settings, despite the excitement of the engagement and looming wedding, an awful lot of the film is flat and frankly rather laboured.

Fonda’s character is awfully stagey and not particularly appealing. Keaton’s character manages to lose her first husband’s ashes amid all their adventures. Oh what larks. Steenburgen’s character is altogether more successful, a woman whose confidence has been shattered by her husband’s heart attack. She has become his prison guard. Cue some tough love from her mates. Best of the lot is Bergen’s character, the one who comes closest to a minimum level of plausibility and certainly the character with the best lines. There’s a lovely fizz between her and police chief Giancarlo Giannini (yep, they all end up in jail); and then Andy Garcia, always charismatic in whatever he does, turns up to do exactly what he did in Mamma Mia 2. So there are certainly some good points.

But coming so soon after the hugely similar 80 For Brady – a film all about not writing people off just because they are advanced in years – it all feels too familiar, despite its rather more attractive locations. And in comparison, 80 For Brady wins hands down in the sincerity stakes. Book Club just doesn’t seem to manage to strike quite the right note. And it’s likely to prove precisely as memorable as the film it’s the sequel to.

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