Book Club: The Next Chapter review – smirking sequel as the squad head for Italy – The Guardian
Bin poor health Holderman’s 2018 silver-years comedy Ebook Membership had the amusing concept of exhibiting us 4 affluent feminine buddies – Vivian (Jane Fonda), Diane (Diane Keaton), Sharon (Candice Bergen) and Carol (Mary Steenburgen), given to consuming balloon glasses of wine and laughing life-affirmingly in picture-perfect kitchens – who’re radicalised by studying Fifty Shades of Gray and impressed to overtake their private relationships. Now for the sequel: it’s a few years later, the heroines have gone by means of the Covid lockdown and saved their e book membership occurring Zoom, flirting with Sally Rooney’s Regular Individuals, however heart-sinkingly sticking with lite fare resembling Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.
But books are irrelevant to their new journey: a bachelorette vacation collectively in Italy earlier than Vivian marries to her boyfriend Arthur (Don Johnson). The wacky quartet have adventures in Rome, Florence and Venice earlier than a romantic finale looms for multiple of them. There are some affordable moments, however the feelgood mission appears to have dominated out any actual jokes. Setting to at least one aspect what would possibly ungallantly be referred to as the inscrutability challenge, the celebrities’ performances are subdued and de-feisted by the limp script, which for some motive permits solely Bergen to be something approaching humorous: she is hard, shrewd, seems to be like an actual particular person and getting laid is her prerogative additionally.
Everybody appears to beam, smirk and giggle their means by means of a narrative wherein they don’t have something as fashionable as company; these feather-headed seniors get into hopeless scrapes and need to be rescued by attentive dishy gents of a sure age, performed by Giancarlo Giannini, Hugh Quarshie and Vincent Riotta. The movie is smothered with a syrup of condescension.
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