‘Book Club: The Next Chapter’ review: Hated it, cover to cover

The plot of “Book Club: The Next Chapter” is set in motion by a line I hope to never hear in a fluffy comedy again: “The travel ban has lifted! And I think we should all go to Italy!”

Great — more pandemic-tainment to depress the masses.

Sharon (Candice Bergen) then piles on another upbeat reason for a European vacation with her three best buds of 40 years: “I’m retired and my cat is dead!”

Womp, womp.

“The Next Chapter” — and, please, be the last — heads to Rome, Venice and Tuscany while clumsily switching between sad and stupid. It’s a “Dumb and Glummer” of a sequel that confuses the worst punchlines ever for Prosecco fizz, when the groaner jokes go down like lukewarm vodka.

At the start, during a montage of lockdown Zoom call book club meetings, one of the women says of Sally Rooney’s novel, “Should we talk about ‘Normal People?’”

Replies Sharon, “Something we have little experience with.” 

She isn’t funny, but she is right. The quartet of wacky women in their seventies decide to head to Italy when free-spirited Vivian (Jane Fonda) reveals she is getting married to her beau Arthur (Don Johnson). 

Everybody has been stuck in a rut lately. The husband of Carol (Mary Steenburgen) is recovering from a heart attack, so she’s terrified of leaving him alone. And although Diane’s (Diane Keaton) relationship with Mitchell (Andy Garcia) has intensified, the widow is still clinging onto the memory of her late husband. Sharon is single, bored and catless.

So off they jet to Rome to shake it off and give Vivian a bachelorette trip we’ll quickly forget.

The mischief the women get into — getting robbed at a train station, being arrested by a grumpy cop, Sharon hooking up with a philosophy professor on a boat — is never hilarious or dramatic or touching or even remotely consequential. 

Every dull development is underscored by the most forgettable electronic keyboard preset music imaginable.

One of the few factors working for “Book Club” is that it’s a shade less moronic than the similar “80 For Brady,” which also starred Fonda in a group of trekking golden girls. Sally Field does not partake in a Guy Fieri chili eating contest here. Thank God.

But “Brady,” at least, had a point and a solid aim — to get to the Super Bowl. “Book Club,” co-written and directed by Bill Holderman, is flighty and meandering and lacks the confidence to settle on a tone. Like with all these schlocky retiree comedies, it’s a downer to see such talented actresses so carelessly wasted.

Not to mention debased by sub-sitcom material.

There’s the wedding dress fitting montage in which snarky former judge Sharon keeps telling a kind Italian fashion designer how ugly his dresses are.

And who can forget the Venice dinner party scene in which the British professor hops onstage and warbles “Gloria” by Laura Branigan? Then, after he gets it on with Sharon on a Venice canal, he is never seen or mentioned again. 

And then there’s my favorite part of all:

“Love brought us here,” sappily says one of the women at the end of the movie.

Another quickly replies, “Love … and the wonderful people at Lufthansa!” 

If you needed any more proof that “Book Club: The Next Chapter” was nothing more than an empty-head payday, there it is.