When “A Simple Favor” came out in 2018, I fell headlong in love. It was just so unhinged, and so self-aware — not the sort of comedy you’d expect from two Hollywood actresses as bankable as Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick, or a filmmaker as mainstream as Paul Feig, who directed the genre-upending “Bridesmaids” in 2011. “A Simple Favor” felt like a melodramatic French psychosexual confection that had suddenly become sentient and started making fun of itself.
You’ll have to go back and remind yourself of the plot before you see the sequel, “Another Simple Favor,” for which Lively, Kendrick and Feig have all returned. It won’t make any sense if you don’t, though it barely makes sense even if you do. Here’s the basic cheat sheet, spoilers obviously included: In the first film, Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick), a widow and a mommy vlogger, becomes embroiled in the life of her young son’s friend’s mother, the glamorous Emily Nelson (Lively). Emily is married to an English professor named Sean (Henry Golding). In the course of the film, sordid secrets are revealed and murders happen, and Stephanie and Sean hook up when they think Emily is dead, and it’s all very bonkers, though the most bonkers part is probably Emily’s amazing pantsuits. (If you know, you know.)
The most pertinent detail to recall going into this new film (besides that other kinda-sorta incestuous liaison from Stephanie’s past) is that Emily is the assumed identity of a woman named Hope. Furthermore, Hope is a triplet; her sisters were named Faith (who’s dead now) and Charity (who died shortly after they were born). Don’t forget that. OK. Deep breath.
“Another Simple Favor” escapes the pedestrian upscale suburban setting of its predecessor, flying (via private plane, naturally) to Capri, Italy, though not until after we learn that Stephanie has pivoted to true crime vlogging and writing, and Emily has figured out how to get out of her prison sentence, and is marrying a glamorous and rich Italian. Naturally she wants Stephanie, her bosom frenemy, to be her maid of honor. So off to the island they go, where things go extremely sideways.
No one is more regretful than me to announce that “Another Simple Favor” is not as bananas as the first film. It was inevitable. The element of surprise is gone, for one thing: “A Simple Favor” was just so plain weird, so far afield of the vibe most people were expecting — what is this psychotic and vaguely erotic movie, and does it know how demented it is? — that the whole thing wound up feeling fresh. You had to lock into its vibe to appreciate it, but in the right frame of mind, it was a pleasure.
The new film can’t repeat that. It is charming, to be sure, with the kind of allure that comes from a script (written by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis) seemingly engineered to compel a movie studio to foot the bill for a couple of months in some stunning sunny location. (See also “Mamma Mia,” “The White Lotus,” “Glass Onion.”) I mean that with admiration, and, let’s be real, some envy.
But the twists and turns get tedious after a while, and the big reveal is telegraphed too soon for it to be fun. There are side quests with a bumbling F.B.I. agent (Taylor Ortega) and Emily’s fiancé’s fearsome mother (Elena Sofia Ricci), but they’re not around enough to feel important. And now that we know the main characters, we know how they’re going to act. Even the addition of Allison Janney as Emily’s crafty Aunt Linda and Elizabeth Perkins (replacing Jean Smart) as Emily’s mother can’t inject a lot of extra life into the story.
Yet there’s still some fun to be had. Despite their trappings, the “Simple Favor” movies don’t really tell those deadly serious “rich people problems” stories — the sort “Big Little Lies” exemplifies. Maybe it’s just that Kendrick and Lively are millennials, or maybe it’s because Emily and Stephanie are scrambling to get into the social class where people have those kinds of problems. There actually is something at stake for these women, which frees them up for a desperate kind of humor, in the vein of those plucky social climbers in a screwball comedy from an earlier era.
Plus, this film knows its predecessor has taken on a life of its own, and is aware in particular that the core of the story isn’t the beautiful men, but the unspoken and unprobed obsession, possibly erotic, between Emily and Stephanie. Men are secondary and disposable in the “Simple Favor” universe. It’s the women, and also what they’re wearing, that is the central object of desire — they’re movies designed to poke fun at the male gaze by fixating on a female one. (In one scene, Emily heads out in the morning wearing a tiered flouncy black skirt slit up to the top of her leg, a white button-down left unbuttoned and tucked in, red-soled Louboutin booties that seem to be made from both leopard and snake skin and a striped floppy-brimmed straw hat the size of Texas that draws an expletive from the lurking, watching Stephanie. We simply, as they say, have to stan.)
Of course, neither of the “Simple Favor” films are really about the plot. They’re about Anna Kendrick being plucky and adorable, about how handsome Henry Golding is, about Blake Lively’s amazing hair, about the costume designers’ impeccable nerve. They’re about craving a bone-dry martini in the Italian sunshine while wearing a rhinestone-studded bikini, about embracing the maximal amount of frivolity by proxy that you can muster in a world where it’s easy to resent how serious, and frustrating, and impossible everything feels.
That’s why, undoubtedly, “A Simple Favor” is still my delightful and weird favorite of the two. But in the end, “Another Simple Favor” is a two-hour vacation I’m not mad to have taken.
Another Simple Favor
Rated R for some rowdy, bawdy chatter, incest-y intimations, murder, intrigue and Henry Golding’s bare derrière. Running time: 2 hours. Watch on Prime Video.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
The post ‘Another Simple Favor’ Review: Big Hats and Big Intrigue appeared first on New York Times.
