Metacritic reviews

Book Club: The Next Chapter is a raucously funny movie that will leave audiences ready to grab their gal pals and set off on an adventure to Italy.

Book Club was, at best, a pleasant diversion. But Book Club: The Next Chapter is something more. It’s a movie that proves that it’s possible to make an entertaining, full-length picture with practically no story.

The film is devoid of serious conflict, yet it hits with unexpected feeling.

The best thing about Book Club: The Next Chapter is just seeing these remarkable actresses do what they do best. I hope Hollywood can make better use of them in the future.

Signed, sealed and delivered, Book Club: The Next Chapter is an unabashed love letter to four great movie stars. As a vehicle for their talents, it’s less of a sure thing.

It’s all quite wispy and anecdotal, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if Bill Holderman, the director of these films, and Erin Simms, his co-screenwriter and producer, had squeezed more texture into the anecdotes.

Blindingly overlit, incoherently edited, and rife with baffling plot contrivances, the disappointing “Book Club: The Next Chapter” still manages to maintain the heart of its original story, but that only seems to be thanks to the chemistry of its central foursome.

Perhaps it was enough for “Book Club” to merely exist as an act of rebellion against the stubbornly young-skewing studio fare. But this follow-up needed to give us more, something along the lines of a sharper film deserving of the earned legacies of Fonda, Keaton, Bergen and Steenburgen.

The film is smothered with a syrup of condescension.

Our core quartet are a well-preserved and still charming lot, with each giving a glimpse of their comic specialties. But like that spring fling, “80 for Brady,” the material here just isn’t up to the legends being paid to perform it.