Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Book Club: The Next Chapter’ on Peacock, in Which Four All-Time Greats Battle Moronic Cliches

Shoulda called it Book Club 2: Electric Bookaloo, but no, instead it’s Book Club: The Next Chapter (now on Peacock), a bland, vaguely cutesy title that’s perfectly accurate in its representation of the underwhelming contents therein. The movie is a yeah-sure-why-not sequel to 2018’s medium-sized hit (read: financially successful enough to warrant a follow-up) Book Club, which starred Candice Bergen, Jane Fonda, Mary Steenburgen and Diane Keaton as thick-as-thieves pals who spice up their thing in the title of the movie by reading 50 Shades of Grey, which inspires them to live their lives a little more boldly. This time around, there’s less book-reading and more farting around in Italy, which is certainly a lovely place in which to fart around, but will it yield anything resembling viable comedy? Ehh.  

BOOK CLUB: THE NEXT CHAPTER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Welp. The book club had to go virtual. Thanks a lot, pandemic! So here we are, the screen divided into video-chat quadrants: Diane (Keaton) in her vast kitchen, Vivian (Fonda) in her colossal kitchen, Sharon (Bergen) in her cavernous kitchen and Carol (Steenburgen) in her behemothic kitchen. GET US OUT OF THESE F—ING KITCHENS. They’re too clean and tidy and huge and stupidly enormous and enormously expensive-looking. What are our principals reading? Who cares! Diane can’t get her webcam to work right and she doesn’t know she’s muted and Carol learned to play the accordion and someone decided to get a pet macaw and there was some knitting and food-pickling and someone load these drecky jokes into a cannon and light a short fuse, please. 

And then finally, at last, Covid goes away and is never mentioned again, just like real life. The four women meet in one of their kitchens, which is big enough to host not just a book club, but a book reading by Elizabeth Gilbert herself. They hug and chatter and catch up and Vivian drops a big one: She’s getting married to Arthur (Don Johnson). After all these years, her first wedding. There’s a rock on her hand the size of a very small kitchen, which is still very big for a diamond. Squeals, gasps. How will they celebrate? Well, remember when they were younger and they planned a trip to Italy that was derailed when Diane got pregnant? Well, life’s too short and they’ve been cooped up by the pandemic too long and it’d be a perfect bachelorette party for Viv so it’s time to fulfill that long-delayed vacay. Book it!

Before we get to the travel montage that features not a single flight cancelation or delay or hiccup and therefore forces us to suspend our disbelief on a string of frayed dental floss over Springfield Gorge, we have to catch up with the one thing in the other characters’ lives that’s worth mentioning. Diane is in a great relationship with Mitchell (Andy Garcia) but still lugs her late husband’s ashes with her to Italy. Sharon, a judge, officially retired from the bench and seems to be fairly horny but that’s never quite made explicit. And Carol’s restaurant was shuttered during Covid, and her hubby Bruce (Craig T. Nelson) is recovering from a heart attack. Wait. That’s two things going on with Carol. Someone rewrite this lousy screenplay. There’s simply too much going on here!

Anyway, they’re in Italy now, so fire up the shenanigans: Gawking at art (read: statues of naked men whose exposed marble wangs are the object of one-liners), shopping for Viv’s wedding dress, fancy dinners, stolen luggage, getting arrested and ending up in jail, train rides, boat tours of Venice, a sexual misadventure or two, running into an old chef pal from 40 years ago (cue up that joke about his meatballs), heart-to-heart conversations, etc. You know how this utterly inconsequential shit goes.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Be grateful that 80 for Brady makes Book Club 2 look like Tokyo Story. But that’s still not an endorsement.

Performance Worth Watching: Steenburgen maintains some poise and dignity even during a scene in which she and a former beau get tipsy and covered with flour as they grunt and moan while kneading bread dough in a moronic visual double-entendre. It’s quite the feat. 

Memorable Dialogue: Pick an egregiously awful double-entendre, any egregiously awful double-entendre, usually delivered by Fonda, e.g., this one: “I think someone’s bouche is already quite amused.” 

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: There’s plenty of eating and loving and praying happening here, although it’s the audience that’s doing the praying – praying for this movie to dredge up a decent joke for its effervescent stars to deliver, or in lieu of that, for it to end. The former doesn’t really happen and the latter happens eventually, after 107 minutes, which isn’t that long in the scheme of things, but is absolutely too long to watch this cast of accomplished pros gut it out through a puerile script. Steenburgen, as I mentioned, maintains a firm grip on the life preserver, but her castmates don’t fare as well; Bergen’s given a nothing of a character and looks awkward delivering dead zingers, and Keaton and Fonda are asked to rely on their threadbare personae of a dithering airhead and saucy lifelong bachelorette.  

On paper, this quartet of old pros should be able to work with anything you put in front of them. But director Bill Holderman, co-writing with Erin Simms, achieves the remarkable feat of making them look by turns sumptuous in robust wardrobes and gorgeous postcard locales, and silly executing the flighty, frequently nonexistent story and delivering fetid dialogue. These characters deserve to be celebrating their friendship with dignity and easy humor, and it’s a gross injustice to who they are – and who’s playing them – to have them wander through Italy’s impeccable museums looking at nude statues and reciting dick jokes that even Beavis and Butthead would find idiotic. At best, Book Club Part Deux is gratingly mediocre, and at worst, it’s simply embarrassing for everyone involved. There are enjoyable and respectful ways to present stories starring women of a certain vintage, but this is not it.

Our Call: A glitchy Zoom call with these four actors discussing The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog would be funnier and more engaging than this. SKIP IT.