This review contains spoilers for Another Simple Favor.
The 2018 hit A Simple Favor had a storyline to match its title: Based on a bestselling novel by Darcey Bell, it was a snarky, snappy thriller that, for all its apparent plot convolutions, ultimately turned on that most basic of soap-opera twists—the secret identical twin. A Simple Favor’s spark came not from the originality of its story but from its central frenemyship, the volatile bond between Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) and Emily (Blake Lively), mothers of first graders at the same suburban Connecticut school. To recap: When the elegant and enigmatic Emily disappeared on a business trip, Stephanie was left taking care of her friend’s son. Concerned that her BFF may have met with foul play, Stephanie promptly turned her perky “mommy vlog” into a just-as-perky true-crime diary and set out to solve the mystery.
Eventually, after complications involving Stephanie’s affair with Emily’s hunky novelist husband Sean (Henry Golding) and an airing of dirty laundry from both women’s pasts, Emily was discovered to have faked her own death by murdering her aforementioned long-lost identical twin. Or, to be precise, long-lost identical triplet—but that’s a complication to be explored in the next movie, Another Simple Favor, the new straight–to–Prime Video sequel directed, like its predecessor, by Paul Feig (Bridesmaids, the 2016 Ghostbusters) and co-written by Jessica Sharzer (who scripted the original) and Laeta Kalogridis (Shutter Island).
This installment, like the first, boasts as its strongest asset the codependent bond between Stephanie, a Type A do-gooder, and Emily, a manipulative yet charismatic con woman. But by moving the action from the oppressively pleasant kitchens of the Connecticut bourgeoisie to an elite hotel on the Italian island of Capri, Another Simple Favor replants the series in a setting that’s suited less to an observational satire of American parenting than to the first film’s chief pleasure: unapologetic clothes-ogling. The costume designer for both films, Renee Ehrlich Kalfus, infuses her flamboyant designs for Lively and Kendrick with so much character-revealing detail—not to mention craftsmanship, humor, and visual appeal—that the reveal of each fresh ’fit offers a chance to learn something new about these cartoonishly different yet thick-as-thieves besties.
In A Simple Favor, Blake Lively’s slo-mo first entrance in a slouchy three-piece men’s suit with an antique pocket watch swinging from the vest, worn with a sky-high pair of bejeweled pumps, had the audience I saw it with gasping in approval (and no doubt making a mental note to research vintage menswear). Another Simple Favor, set not only on a resort island in the Tyrrhenian Sea but at an extravagant mob-financed wedding, pulls out all the stops in equipping bride-to-be Emily with a still-more-eye-popping wardrobe: a navel-baring top formed entirely of what appear to be welded-together pink metal roses, a black-and-white striped straw hat with a floppy brim wider than a garbage-can lid, and an all-black set of widow’s weeds that suggests “Like a Virgin”–era Madonna as drawn by an extra-depressed Edward Gorey.
Sadly, Another Simple Favor never delivers this level of wit or style at the level of its story or script. The opening scene finds the two onetime rivals at turning points in their lives: Seven years after the events of the original, Stephanie, now a true-crime vlogger with a passionate fan following, has just come out with her first book, The Faceless Blonde, an account of her misadventures with the now-incarcerated Emily. But at Stephanie’s first book signing, Emily makes a grand entrance, having wangled an early release from prison through the connections of her mobbed-up Italian boyfriend, Dante (365 Days’ Michele Morrone). Emily is about to marry Dante in a sumptuous destination wedding on the isle of Capri; against her best instincts, and still drawn in by her friend’s unflappable insouciance, Stephanie finds herself agreeing to serve as maid of honor. She packs up her jauntiest resort wear and heads to the island with her now-tween-aged son, Miles (a returning Joshua Satine).
The choice to follow a known liar and convicted murderer to a second location, however luxurious that location may be, seems a poor initial choice on Stephanie’s part, but what are thriller plots made of if not bad decisions based on half-understood dark impulses? Once on the island, Stephanie meets a few characters familiar to us from the first movie. Henry Golding’s Sean, who’s been raising his and Emily’s son on his own for the past seven years, has gone from caddish heartthrob to bitter, self-pitying drunk. Meanwhile, Emily’s long-estranged mother (played by Jean Smart in the previous film and here by Elizabeth Perkins) is both (still) an alcoholic and, to judge by her confusion about what she is doing at this posh event, somewhere in the early stages of dementia. These depressing arcs hardly lend themselves to the arch comedy treatment of Sharzer and Kalogridis’ script. There’s a residue of pathos that clings to both these characters and makes it hard to laugh at the indignities the film puts them through, including, in Sean’s case, being gruesomely murdered in his hotel-room shower while trying and failing to masturbate.
Strangely enough, at a gathering where so many guests have a plausible motive for killing the bride, it’s the male members of the wedding party who start to get offed. Only hours after the ceremony is performed, the bridegroom himself is shot by an unseen assailant, leading to a final act that’s a frantic pileup of interlocking—or sometimes just free-floating—plot twists. The groom turns out to have been a closeted gay man who was in love, Romeo and Juliet–style, with his chief rival from the area’s other mob family. Emily’s ominously nice Aunt Linda (Allison Janney), who’s there to help escort the bride’s semi-demented mother at the wedding, reveals herself to be a moral monster who for decades has been raising Emily’s long-concealed third triplet, Charity (Lively again), in isolation, so as to turn her into a kind of crime-committing windup doll whose innocently girlish demeanor provides a cover for her adopted mother’s iniquities. Their latest scheme is a plan to kill Emily so that her surviving sibling can steal her identity and live as Dante’s uberwealthy widow.
It’s with a late plot development in regard to Charity that the ambiently-icky-but-so-far-mostly-harmless tone of Another Simple Favor starts to leave a genuinely sour taste. Among the newly resurfaced triplet’s pathologies is a hyperfixation on her one surviving sister. In an attempt to keep Emily from fleeing the island, Charity doses her with a muscle-paralyzing toxin, after which—to the intense discomfort of the audience with whom I watched Another Simple Favor—Charity proceeds to fondle her immobilized but conscious sister, eventually climbing on top of her for some suggestive Blake Lively–on–Blake Lively grinding. A movie that started out focused on the complicated love-hate relationship between two female friends has taken an unforeseen side path involving nonconsensual identical-twin incest.
It should be stipulated that sibling incest is not a new theme to the Simple Favor franchise. In the first movie, Kendrick’s character reveals her darkest secret during a martini-soaked conversation with her glamorous new friend: Years before, on the day of her father’s funeral, she hooked up with her sexy half brother, a relative she never knew existed until he showed up at the memorial. Stephanie’s confession, which promptly inspires Emily to nickname her “Brotherfucker,” shows the audience a glimpse of this prim character’s taboo-breaking past. But given that the sex she and her half brother had is shown in a flashback to be enthusiastically consensual—and that the two were not, like Emily and Charity, genetically identical full siblings—Stephanie’s ill-advised fraternal transgression has a less viscerally disturbing feeling attached to it than the truly sordid twin-molestation moment in Another Simple Favor. Feig has long been a filmmaker who’s at his best when showcasing complicated female relationships. But a character being drugged and then sexually assaulted by her long-lost identical triplet? That’s the stuff of a tawdry V.C. Andrews novel, not a glossy studio comedy scored with bouncy Italian pop.
At the risk of moralizing about a movie that was clearly intended as an irreverent escapist romp, I can’t help but add that, even leaving aside the nonconsensual sister-fondling and the cruel jokes at the expense of a drunk dementia victim, Another Simple Favor also fails to do right by the character of Emily’s son, middle school–aged Nicky (played by Ian Ho, the same actor we saw seven years ago as a small child). Sure, he’s a minor character, but this is a boy who, according to the movie’s own script, has spent more than half his life being raised by an angry alcoholic father while his mother was in prison, and who, on a trip to watch said mother marry a mobster, has just lost his only custodial parent in a brutal murder. Amid all of the antic chases and comic identity swaps that make up the second half of the movie, I couldn’t stop asking myself a question that no character in the film seemed especially concerned with: Is Nicky OK? The last scene of Another Simple Favor has the boy living with Stephanie and her son, while Emily, on the run from the law, calls from the road to check in. If there’s a third installment in this rapidly deflating franchise—An Even Simpl3r Favor?—perhaps the amoral but charismatic protagonist should be not Lively’s dressed-to-kill sociopath but the adult Nicky, by now clued in to the destruction wreaked by his mother’s and guardian’s toxic friendship and out for revenge.
