I have somehow failed to ever post a full review of 2018's snappy camp-trash classic A Simple Favor any of the three times we've watched it - first at the theater, then twice more on 4K digital - but it's one of our faves and each time I've logged it it crept up in its score, starting at 7.5/10 and currently at 8.5/10. It's a blast and made us reevaluate Blake Lively after years of clowning on her in Gossip Girl. (She was also good in the Girl vs Shark movie The Shallows.) So when word that a sequel was coming, great joy happened in Xanadu. So how does Another Simple Favor, sent straight to streaming on Amazon Prime Video because studios hate money, fare? It's OK.
We open with what listeners of the terrific Scriptnotes podcast will recognize as a Stuart Special with mommy vlogger/true crime solver Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick, A Simple Favor) streaming from her hotel room in Capri, proclaiming her innocence from killing frenemy Emily Nelson's new husband. Ruh-roh.
We then flashback a few days to get caught up on where we are five years after the events of the first film. Stephanie has written a book about those events and built a large following with her amateur sleuthing. At a book reading she is shocked by the arrival of Emily (Blake Lively, A Simple Favor), sprung from prison pending appeal by the powerful lawyers of her new fiance, Dante Versano (Michele Morrone, Subservience), an old Italian boyfriend. Emily is there to ask Stephanie to be her maid of honor and if she doesn't there will be lawsuits, etc. So it's off to Capri she goes, accompanied by Vicky (Alex Newell, Glee), her literary agent whose hoping for another book to come from it.
Stephanie is on edge because she feels Emily wants to kill her for wrecking her life, shagging her husband Sean (Henry Golding, A Simple Favor), leaving her son Nicky (Ian Ho, A Simple Favor) without a mother, etc. Emily's mercurial nature doesn't put her at ease even as she somewhat reassures her.
At the rehearsal luncheon, the surprises continue as it appears Dante's family business is in the vein of The Godfather with another family, the Bartolos, being antagonists and Dante's mother, Portia (Elena Sofia Ricci, all Italian movies), none to happy with this blonde interloper so she ups the ante by springing that he'd brought Emily's estranged borderline senile mother, Margaret (Elizabeth Perkins, Big, taking over from Jean Smart, A Simple Favor), and her aunt Linda (Allison Janney, The West Wing), to the party, much to Emily's consternation.
After much snarky banter, the story shifts into a darker gear as the men in Emily's life begin getting dead and for some reason Stephanie is the prime suspect to the local police and they place her under house arrest. Fortunately, she has a FBI agent (Taylor Ortega, The Four Seasons) following her to protect her. Too bad she's very incompetent and not on the case very long. (Nudge wink.) It all leads to some twisty-turny hijinks that require more suspension of disbelief than how Emily's wardrobe manages to cover her naughty bits like the beads on the Na'vi in the Avatar movies.
While I enjoyed Another Simple Favor overall, the screenplay by Jessica Sharzer (co-writer of A Simple Favor) and Laeta Kalogridis (Terminator: Genisys, Alita: Battle Angel) is simultaneously overstuffed and undercooked with too many scenes and/or characters which could've been trimmed or eliminated completely. It feels like 15-20 minutes more material got trimmed out when it should've been either left in, the overall runtime cut back from 120 minutes, or different choices made; the FBI and literary agents could've been omitted entirely.
The tone also gets too dark in spots; we don't need to see a beloved character's grisly demise so graphically portrayed and then a family member seemingly totally unaffected mere hours later. And the denouement relies on something being used that there is absolutely zero way it could've been present; deus ex machinas don't get more deusy than this even when it is so foreshadowed that I called it at about the 20-minute mark. And the supposed big twist wasn't much of a surprise, though I'll admit another twist was news, though it also raises questions the movie isn't interested in answering; just go with it.
That said, if you're here for some sparky, bitchy back-and-forth between Kendrick & Lively, Another Simple Favor delivers enough of the goods to carry the day. There is a stretch where Lively is offscreen and she's missed. Perkins is a poor substitute for Smart, playing Margaret's dementia too broadly. (I'm guessing Smart was too busy filming Hacks to come back.) Morrone has little charisma, same as in Subservience, so I'm not sure why Hollywood is trying to hard to give him the Cam Gigandet treatment.
Amazon's 4K HDR10 presentation is nicely bright, capturing the luxurious details of the Capri setting like a tourism board commercial. Why so many movies refuse to use contrast and color these days sucks, but this isn't a disappointment.
The end of Another Simple Favor hints at a sequel and I am here for it. Ignore the haters who are "Team Justin" are are review bombing the movie online because they're jealous bitches envious of Lively's life or the film critics who didn't see the first one, don't understand the humor, and called it the worst movie of the year (as if it was a threat to film, ahem) and settle in for a messy, but still entertaining visit with the pair whose ideal of "family relations" gets pretty twisted at times. If you haven't seen the first one, it's currently on Netflix and MUST be seen before this to appreciate it properly.
Score: 7/10. Catch it on Prime Video.
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