Another Simple Favour
Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively are reunited for a sequel that starts with enormous promise before completely going off the rails.
A big fat Italian wedding: Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively
Image courtesy of Amazon Prime.
The great fun of Paul Feig’s A Simple Favour was seeing how the blogger and baker Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) got sucked into the sophisticated, dangerous orbit of Emily Nelson (Blake Lively). The latter was the very antithesis of Stephanie, a beauty who oozed confidence and an elan light years from Stephanie’s own domestic domain. Emily’s raison d'être was to shock and belittle and soon she had Stephanie transfixed in her headlights. To be fair to her, she did warn Stephanie, “you do not want to be friends with me, believe me.” But Stephanie could not resist the outspoken, outrageous company of this tantalising femme fatale, who adorned her deluxe home with paintings of her own pudendum. Then, one day, Emily asked Stephanie for a simple favour: to pick up her son from school. And things just went from trad to worse.
From Emily’s rat-a-tat put-downs (defending Stephanie’s vanilla lifestyle: “but prudes are people, too”), to every supporting turn, however brief, the film refused to waste one entertaining minute. This was Laurel & Hardy with class and high heels. And just as we suspected where it was all going, Feig and his scenarist Jessica Sharzer tripped us up by turning every cliché on its head.
It's probably helpful if one has seen the first film, as Another Simple Favour – also directed by Paul Feig and co-scripted by Sharzer – presumes an awful lot. Like the first film, it opens with Stephanie presenting one of her vlogs, but this time from the confines of house arrest in a villa on the island of Capri. For those ‘moms’ who had just tuned in, she rewinds to how she has got to where she is, from the hectic moments of packing her son off to camp and a book signing of her poorly selling true-crime tome ‘The Faceless Blonde,’ a tale of her tumultuous liaison with Emily. And who should turn up at her book signing but Emily herself, in an absurdly outré outfit, fresh out of prison on appeal.
Another Simple Favour is just one of two Anna Kendrick sequels out right now, the other being The Accountant 2, which happened to start filming at exactly the same time (in March of last year). Unfortunately, there is only so much Anna Kendrick to go round, so you won’t find her in the latter.
The simple favour here is actually quite a big ask, as Emily invites Stephanie to be her maid of her honour at her upcoming marriage to Mafia don and handsome Sylvester Stallone lookalike Dante Versano (Michele Morrone) in Capri. Obviously, Stephanie smells a rat, but a free trip to Capri (“the most gorgeous place on earth”) is not to be sniffed at. Nor is the threat of a lawsuit to be entirely ignored. But what is Emily’s real motive for flying Stephanie halfway around the world?
From the outset, the one-liners fizzle with the effervescence of Moët & Chandon. Emily on Dante: “He taught me Italian, you know. In all the ways.” To Stephanie: “Let’s agree to disagree. You need me. You were never nice. You were just afraid to be mean.” And Stephanie: “My mom always said that holding a grudge was like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die.” In fact, much of the dialogue is quite shocking, too, sprinkling the ‘f’ and ’c’ word around like they were going out of fashion. And the ambiguous rapport between Emily and Stephanie continues to keep us on our toes, until the tone shifts from comedy noir into far-fetched farce. As the sequel struggles to be a stylish, flashy and ever-so naughty caper, it rapidly descends into the absurd. The twists keep on coming, but at the expense of all credibility. And several scenes just don’t make sense. The superimposition of the sound of a gun being cocked is an out-and-out cheat, while there’s the case of the mole on Blake Lively’s cheek. Without wishing to give anything away, let’s just say that the removal of Robert De Niro’s mole in The Alto Knights helped distinguish one character from the other – something the continuity crew here overlooked to the film’s disadvantage. You’ll know when you see it.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Andrew Rannells, Bashir Salahuddin, Elizabeth Perkins, Michele Morrone, Elena Sofia Ricci, Henry Golding, Allison Janney, Alex Newell, Joshua Satine, Ian Ho, Aparna Nancherla, Kelly McCormack, Holmes, Jake Tapper (as himself), Diletta Jayne.
Dir Paul Feig, Pro Paul Feig and Laura Fischer, Screenplay Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis, Ph John Schwartzman, Pro Des Martin Whist, Ed Brent White, Music Theodore Shapiro, Costumes Renée Ehrlich Kalfus, Dialect coach Benjamin Samuel Shilling.
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer/Lionsgate/Feigco Entertainment-Amazon Prime.
120 mins. USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 1 May 2025. Cert. 15.
