Bill Holderman

Club: The Next Chapter – lazy screenwriting undercuts the best intentions of a quartet of highly competent actresses who have – collectively – earned four Oscars, six Emmys and 13 Golden Globes. This sequel to the 2018 Book Club comedy reunites Jane Fonda, Diane Keaton, Candice Bergen and Mary Steenburgen as lifelong friends who decide to celebrate the end of their zoom calls during the pandemic quarantine with a fun-filled trip to Tuscany. These talented sightseers deserve better than this briefly anecdotal fluff, filled with clichéd PG-13 double entendres.

The overall romanticism of the film will work for some audiences, and where the comedy is obvious there are moments that are generally delightful. Director Bill Holderman and Erin Simms’ original script for Book Club wasn’t groundbreaking, but it was something that really cared about giving older women some form of empowerment. Their work on Book Club: The Next Chapter seems more focused on cashing in on the success of the first film than really investigating the lives of the women they had the audience invest in the first time around. Beautiful scenery and accomplished actors pulls Book Club: The Next Chapter over the line, and it will charm a certain demographic, but it is a disappointing sequel to Book Club and its by-the-numbers approach really doesn’t do anyone any favors.