Book Club follows the group of 4 senior citizens and their adventures reading the book “Fifty Shades of Grey”. The book rejuvenates their sexual desires and they actively try to get “back in the game”. A pretty strange idea to say the least, but defiantly doable, but does Book Club pull it off? (Note: I’ve never read any of the FSoG books or saw any of the movies. I know what it’s about though and some other minor details, but some more minute references probably went over my head.)
The cast is amazing. They’re what holds this whole film together and kept me interested. Although the writing itself isn’t that great, the cast is so good that some jokes that shouldn’t have worked, worked anyway. They were just fun to watch, every character was wonderfully acted.
The film is oddly charming. I don’t quiet know how to describe it, but it has this happy vibe throughout that just really works. There’s very few sad moments, but even those are very lighthearted and don’t bring the movie down.
The writing is nothing really original. You’ve probably rented a movie with the same plot every date night since the creation of Blockbuster. The addition of older actors doesn’t do much to change this. Although the higher emphasis on comedy does help, anybody feeling romcom fatigue won’t find much enjoyment out of this one.
The comedy is very hit or miss, and for a movie placing most of it’s chips on the comedy, this is a problem. Although the actors do help to remedy this and make jokes that otherwise wouldn’t work, work, this effort isn’t really enough. There are a lot of jokes though, so you are bound to find a couple you like, with me, it mostly just made me smile, no really laugh-out-loud moments. Most of the jokes are very sexual, and I feel that the PG-13 rating is holding these back from really going the extra mile they needed to work. The packed audience was laughing their asses off though. Seriously, I’ve never heard an audience laugh so constantly, and so hard, at a movie. It may be because I was the youngest one there by at least 30 years, but the humor wasn’t very effective to me.
Overall, I feel like Book Club squandered a good cast with a less then admirable script. Although some people say a movie is only as good as the script, the cast defiantly bumped it up a few notches in my book because they were the only thing that made the experience at all enjoyable. If you like PG-13 sex jokes, or the trailer made you laugh, you’ll probably enjoy this one, but everyone else best stay away. 5.5/10 Mediocre
(I wrote this for the "Secret Passage Reviews" Tumblr page, if you want more reviews like this one, go there.)
Submitted May 27, 2018 at 08:30AM by cowthe2000 https://ift.tt/2xg460K
