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The Jane Austen Book Club is a movie aimed at a specific audience. If you’ve read and loved every Jane Austen novel then this movie is for you. I do not fall into that category and this was not a very pleasant movie going experience, especially when everyone else in the theater was an old lady who laughed out loud constantly at things that weren’t that funny. This is one of the worst romantic comedies of the year; contrived, unrealistic, and mind-numbingly boring. I was not offered one legitimate reason to care about anyone or anything that happens in this movie.

The plot to this mess, based on the novel by Karen Joy Fowler, is as about as exciting and interesting as the title sounds, which isn’t saying much. It’s simple: five women and one man start a book club that’s exclusively about discussing every Jane Austen book. Try this experiment: go to a book club meeting about an author you don’t know very much about and listen to the women discuss the book for an hour-and-a-half and you’ll have some idea of how boring The Jane Austen Book Club is. Not to say this is the whole movie but far too much time is spent on the characters reading the audience to sleep or talking them to death.

The theme of the movie is the members of this book club find themselves in situations in their lives that are very Austen like. Kathy Baker (2006′s All the King’s Men) plays Bernadette who comes up with the idea for the book club. She invites her recently divorced daughter Sylvia (Amy Brenneman, 2005′s Nine Lives and her lesbian but incredibly gorgeous granddaughter Allegra (Maggie Grace, 2005′s The Fog) to join. She also recruits Prudence (Emily Blunt, 2006′s The Devil Wears Prada), a high school French teacher, and Sylvia’s best friend Jocelyn. Jocelyn (2006′s Flicka)bumps into Grigg (Hugh Dancy, Evening), who doesn’t know very much about Austen but invites him along anyway to get a male’s perspective. I got the hidden theme of the movie from the listed synopsis on IMDb. I say hidden because writer/director Robin Swicord seems to repeatedly neglect the part of the audience that hasn’t read Austen. The viewer has to know the books to get the movie and it shouldn’t be like that.

The story is simple and yet so unrealistic. Usually these movies have simple storylines and they need to be character driven, but not one of these characters feel real enough to believe and are not worth caring about. Each subplot involving these characters are much too convenient and thus the result is a very cliched and predictable script. It’s not even thirty minutes into the movie where the viewer can clearly see what will happen. There are some performances that are better than others but the acting as a whole is average at best. The men in the movie get the same treatment as the husbands in Desperate Housewives. Most of the so called funny scenes are either dumb or just there for the Austen audience to laugh at.

For every scene that shows some emotional depth, and there are very few, there is an equally cheesy scene that we’ve seen time and time again in countless other romantic comedies. The last scene is particularly awful; a level that The Game Plan wouldn’t sink to in its wildest dreams. At times when The Jane Austen Book Club explores Prudence’s life and her decision to either keep her husband or start a relationship with one of her students, the film is tolerable. The same when the movie goes into the detail about Allegra, not just because she’s a lesbian. Where the movie is at its worst however are scenes like where the men in the movie start loving Austen’s books. The ladies can have their book club but it would be more believable if they left the men out of it.

One can only guess why Hollywood seems to have Austen fever, this being the second movie released this year with the author’s name in the title. Becoming Jane wasn’t anything special or original. The two films share a common trait by pulling plot devices out of the Austen novels and inserting them into the storylines. Becoming Jane had its flaws but was passable due to it likeable cast and it’s engaging enough plot. Robin Swicord’s adaptation of The Jane Austen Book Club is completely tone deaf with almost every scene falling flat. Swicord, along with the cast, fail to breath any life into the movie or bring anything new to the table.

Grade: D