On paper, there are plenty of reasons to make a follow-up to A Simple Favor, Paul Feig’s 2018 comic mystery film starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively as two delusive, scheming suburban moms. Though it gestured at being a serious thriller – a sort of Gone Girl for cable – the film, based on the 2017 novel by Darcey Bell, ultimately devolved into ridiculousness, untethered from logic yet with plenty of road for more twists. Lively’s Emily Nelson, an archly manipulative psychopath straight out of a Justin Baldoni lawsuit, remains her best work since Gossip Girl. And most pertinent to Amazon MGM studios, the film found post-theatrical success on streaming, becoming a modern camp classic during the pandemic.
But Feig, by his own admission at the SXSW film festival on Friday evening, is wary of sequels, and for good reason – rarely does lightning strike twice, especially in suburban Connecticut. A Simple Favor ended in settled-enough fashion, with (spoiler alert) Emily in prison for the murder of her secret identical twin sister and attempted murder of her husband, with Kendrick’s Stephanie, a successful mommy vlogger, and their hapless mutual ex Sean (Henry Golding) living in peace in San Diego.
Feig’s reservations were warranted: Another Simple Favor, again written by Jessica Sharzer along with Laeta Kalogridis, unsurprisingly does not match the intoxicating magic of the original, which feinted at something sinister and twisted in the facades of motherhood before plunging off the deep end. It is neither suspenseful nor thrilling, but something else: a movie so confidently ridiculous, so stylishly absurd and so self-aware of its mandate for fun that you can’t help but enjoy it, reasonable wariness – and all reason, really – be damned.
Another Simple Favor picks up where the first one left off, in that it begins in its latent camp sensibilities and barrels full-force into unabashed silliness. As with the original, Kendrick’s ever-peppy and self-effacing Stephanie opens the proceedings in medias res, vlogging (or, because it’s 2025, livestreaming) from house arrest in Italy. Why? How? She recaps for her followers: she has spent the intervening years baking zucchini bread and solving Reddit’s best mysteries with haunting results, once again revealed in pulpy flashbacks. Her fellow Connecticut moms, played by Kelly McCormack, Aparna Nancherla and Andrew Rannells, are as bitchy as ever. And Emily, now the “faceless blond” of Stephanie’s under-selling true-crime memoir, is walking free, sprung from prison by the generosity of her mysterious new fiance, an Italian hunk/mob heir named, yes, Dante (Michele Morrone).
Emily crashes Stephanie’s sparsely attended book reading, slo-mo strut and jumpsuit-chic outfit on lock, with a request that’s less another simple favor than a massive, confounding ask: be her maid of honor at her lavish wedding in Capri? Stephanie accepts, which is the first sign that this movie will be uncovering new shades of the word “ludicrous” at every turn. From the minute Emily’s private jet takes flight, Another Simple Favor abandons any pretense of seriousness or grounding – in fact, the first movie’s deranged plot twists serve as the bread and butter of this sequel’s many in-jokes, the characters quick to point out the whole perverse web of backstabbing deceit as it grows ever more complex and unhinged.
Italian mob weddings being what they are, the blood begins to spill almost as soon as the guests arrive. Golding’s Sean is there, now more surly and pathetic (and naked – no one can ever accuse Another Simple Favor of not knowing its audience), as well as Emily’s beloved son Nicky (Ian Ho), who is 10 going on 20 with some understandable mood issues. So, too, is Dante’s unimpressed mob boss mother (Elena Sofia Ricci), Stephanie’s incompetent book agent Vicky (Broadway’s Alex Newell), Emily’s senile mother (Elizabeth Perkins, taking over for Jean Smart) and her long-lost loony aunt Linda (Allison Janney), rounding out a cast of one-dimensional characters who test one’s patience but ultimately do not distract from the mission of smooth-brained amusement. (Janney, especially, can do a lot with a little.)
Another Simple Favor drops threads and drags on, but survives on its self-assured baseline pleasures: the gorgeous yet nonsensical setting of Capri, the lush wonders of Renée Ehrlich Kalfus’s costume design (Lively once again sports a murderers’ row of completely impractical suits) and the two leads’ perfectly calibrated banter, at once winking and convincing. Lively, especially, shines in her grand return performance amid the widely scrutinized legal battle surrounding It Ends with Us. The slippery Emily is a particular pitch of bemused psycho that could easily tip into cartoonish or smug, and she holds it. Kendrick’s comic timing, meanwhile, remains sharp as a tack. Without both, the whole pageant would collapse.
And it nearly does. Feig’s crisp direction notwithstanding, Another Simple Favor attempts some plot twists better left unsaid and forgotten. But even overstaying its welcome at two hours, soaring past the boundaries of taste and reaching the astral plane of should-be offensive absurdity cannot derail the experience of watching these toxic frenemies back in action. It may not be the next chapter we needed, but more money-mandated sequels could stand to have this little self-seriousness.
Another Simple Favor is screening at the SXSW film festival and will be available on Amazon Prime Video on 1 May
