Another Simple Favor Is So Fun, Until It Gets So Dumb

Let’s deal with the important stuff first: Blake Lively makes her entrance in Another Simple Favor in a suit, as she must — as she did in 2018’s A Simple Favor, showing up to school pickup like an eruption into the upscale suburban setting from a much more interesting movie. But this time, while the heels are still sky high, they’re covered in spiked hardware, as though Lively’s character, Emily Nelson, has needed to armor up while away. The outfit is all muted horizontal gray and white stripes, accessorized with a chain belt that jingles as she strides into the Warfield, Connecticut bookstore where Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) is having a book reading. The effect may be a callback to the beginning of the first film, but more than that, it gives couture convict — a hilariously upscale riff on a prison uniform for a character who’d be sent to jail for murdering her father and her twin sister, shooting her husband, Sean (Henry Golding), and preparing to kill Stephanie herself, but who has turned up unaccountably free.

The glee of A Simple Favor, which was directed by Paul Feig (who returns for the sequel) and adapted from a novel by Darcey Bell, is that it was just a lot stranger than it needed to be, electrified by undercurrents that turned what was basically a Gone Girl knockoff thriller into something far less predictable. On paper, it was about a lonely mommy blogger whose connection with the town’s glamorous outlier took a turn when the latter mysteriously vanished, leaving her son and husband in her friend’s care. But on the screen, both Emily and Stephanie were utterly unhinged from the start. Emily, in her prim sweaters and rictus smile, was such a tightly wound supermom that she looked capable of cutting a bitch long before she decided to turn detective while taking over her friend’s life. (The movie is one of the few to really lean into Kendrick’s manic edge.) And Stephanie was more of a visiting celebrity than a woman who felt trapped in a small town after a more adventurous life in the city, her outlandish outfits smacking of costumes, her whole life looking like a set she of course could leave behind. If the story was about a toxic suburban friendship, the movie itself was about a psychosexual meeting of alarming soulmates.

Before it utterly loses the thread, Another Simple Favor (which premiered Friday at the SXSW Film Festival and will stream on Prime Video May 1st), plays like a perfect escalation of everything that made the original film so pleasurable. Stephanie’s become a full time true-crime influencer, though a case that went south has led her to ill-advisedly go dark on social media just as the book she wrote about Emily is being published. When Emily glides into that bookstore to announce that she’s been released from jail (the movie handwaves this away with a mention of “high powered lawyers”), is getting married in Italy, and wants Stephanie to be her maid of honor, the characters are as aware of the absurdity of this ask as the movie is. But both Emily and Stephanie know that Stephanie is going to say yes, even before Emily lightly threatens to sue her best frenemy for using her likeness without permission. Stephanie needs Emily, not just for the content — though Emily does mention that the wedding will goose Stephanie’s subscribers and sales, even if her book agent (Alex Newell) seems a little too excited by the possibility of her client getting murdered. Stephanie needs Emily because Emily is the only person who understands her. “You were never nice,” she says to the woman who put her behind bars. “You were just afraid to be mean.”

The nuptials take place on the astoundingly beautiful island of Capri, and the groom is a wealthy, maco mafioso named Dante Versano (played by Michele Morrone of the wildly popular, wildly panned 365 Days movies). The whole leadup to the ceremony is genuinely delicious, not just because of the decadent setting, where Emily’s outfits finally make sense, but because the characters all feel freed to sling unapologetically cunty insults at each other about the ridiculousness of what’s happening (Jessica Sharzer, who wrote the first script, is joined by Laeta Kalogridis for this sequel). Sean, court ordered to escort his and Emily’s son Nicky (Ian Ho) to the wedding, gets wasted and informs Emily that her “cavernous vagina” was like fucking a “windsock in a rainstorm.” (Emily, unflustered, introduces Sean to Dante as her “baby mama.”) Portia (Elena Sofia Ricci), Dante’s mom, so loathes Emily that she finds and invites her estranged mother Margaret (Elizabeth Perkins, taking over for Jean Smart), who arrives at the rehearsal dinner shrieking about demon spawn, as well as a random aunt, Linda (Allison Janney). The vibe is somewhere between Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and a drag show, and it’s tremendously fun until people start dying and the film feels obligated to lean into intrigue.

I have no idea why the police and the Versano family would believe that Stephanie is responsible for Dante’s death, a situation we’re informed of from the opening scene. But it makes so little sense by the time we arrive at the scene in question that it throws everything in the movie permanently off-kilter. The very premise of Another Simple Favor is outrageous, but it follows its own internal logic — at least in the first half. The second, which involves multiple murders, a bumbling FBI agent, and a reliance on a tossed-off line in the first movie, throws that logic out to lead with whims. It doesn’t feel subversively strange, just self-consciously campy and irritatingly smug. The tension with which Feig treated his source material is gone, and it starts to seem like literally anything could happen. Which is a shame, because Emily and Stephanie have a joyously dark dynamic, with Emily constantly needling Stephanie about their history (she at one point jokes that if she ends up dead, Stephanie can fuck Dante too), while Stephanie, empowered to let her freak flag fly, gives as good as she gets. Kendrick and Lively have an undeniable chemistry that allows you to buy that these two characters really do like one another, despite the circumstances. But that only matters when those circumstances mean something, and by the end of Another Simple Favor, they don’t — nothing matters at all.