Book Club: The Next Chapter review – smirking sequel as the squad head for Italy

Bill Holderman’s 2018 silver-years comedy Book Club had the amusing idea of showing us four prosperous female friends – Vivian (Jane Fonda), Diane (Diane Keaton), Sharon (Candice Bergen) and Carol (Mary Steenburgen), given to drinking balloon glasses of wine and laughing life-affirmingly in picture-perfect kitchens – who are radicalised by reading Fifty Shades of Grey and inspired to overhaul their personal relationships. Now for the sequel: it is a few years later, the heroines have gone through the Covid lockdown and kept their book club going on Zoom, flirting with Sally Rooney’s Normal People, but heart-sinkingly sticking with lite fare such as Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist.

Related: ‘God, life is so strange’: Diane Keaton on dogs, doors, wine and why she’s ‘really fancy’

Yet books are irrelevant to their new adventure: a bachelorette holiday together in Italy before Vivian marries to her boyfriend Arthur (Don Johnson). The wacky quartet have adventures in Rome, Florence and Venice before a romantic finale looms for more than one of them. There are some reasonable moments, but the feelgood mission seems to have ruled out any real jokes. Setting to one side what might ungallantly be called the inscrutability issue, the stars’ performances are subdued and de-feisted by the limp script, which for some reason permits only Bergen to be anything approaching funny: she is tough, shrewd, looks like a real person and getting laid is her prerogative also.

Everyone seems to beam, smirk and giggle their way through a story in which they do not have anything as modern as agency; these feather-headed seniors get into hopeless scrapes and have to be rescued by attentive dishy gentlemen of a certain age, played by Giancarlo Giannini, Hugh Quarshie and Vincent Riotta. The film is smothered with a syrup of condescension.

• Book Club: The Next Chapter is released on 11 May in Australia and 12 May in the US and UK.