Anna Kendrick stars as suburban mom-turned-true-crime-author Stephanie in Another Simple Favour.Photo Credit: Lorenzo Sisti/Amazon Prime Video
Another Simple Favor
Directed by Paul Feig
Written by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis
Starring Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively and Henry Golding
Classification N/A; 120 minutes
Streaming on Prime Video starting May 1
The 2018 lark A Simple Favor was a surprisingly delightful confection – equal parts airport-ready page-turner, self-conscious farce, and just-sinister-enough murder mystery. And while the film wasn’t exactly a box-office phenomenon upon release, its long-tail combination of algorithmic-friendly stars Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, plus director Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, The Heat, and my vote for best comedy of the 2010s, Spy) evidently prevented enough subscriber churn for Prime Video for Amazon to bankroll a direct-to-streaming sequel. But seven years is a long time to attempt a reheating of all the many ingredients that made the original film go down so easily, and Another Simple Favor simply tastes off.
After their estrangement at the end of the first film, suburban mom-turned-true-crime-author Stephanie (Kendrick) is reunited with the recently imprisoned double-murderer Emily (Lively). For reasons too dubious to detail, Stephanie is coaxed into becoming Emily’s maid of honour for her destination wedding in Capri, where the ex-convict is set to marry a mafia scion (Michele Morrone). Yadda yadda yadda, a bunch of people start dropping dead ahead of the nuptials, and once again Stephanie is caught in Emily’s web of deceptions.
Aside from Emily’s eye-popping wardrobe – lavishly stylized outfits that offer more characterization than any other single element of the film – everything in Another Simple Favor feels severely downgraded. The story’s twists are alternately predictable or nonsensical, the comedy is mean without being spirited, and the dialogue exhausting when it isn’t frequently and unnecessarily nasty (I lost track of how many c-word bombs are dropped, proving the diminishing returns of shock comedy). Even the stunning Capri scenery is flattened on-screen, with Feig and his returning cinematographer John Schwartzman barely expending the energy to appreciate their naturally beautiful surroundings.
Kendrick is as charming as always, turning Stephanie into a character to root for even as she becomes more of a nuisance than the most gracious of European countries could tolerate. But no actress could successfully leap over the emotional brick wall that is Lively. Choosing to play Emily not as a grand, seductive villain but something of an unapproachable and unknowable goddess, Lively casts an unintentional chill over the entire affair. Even a ludicrous third-act turn that seems explicitly engineered to allow Lively to go absolutely bonkers – a White Lotus-level role of taboo-busting norms that so many performers would kill to embody – is steamrolled into nothingness by the star.
So, if Feig and company have the stomach to heed just one more simple favor: please, stop.
