Pure hokum under the sun, in Paul Feig’s delightfully catty Capri confection.
Let’s not dance around it: Another Simple Favor is the cuntiest film of the year. If the original film flirted with noir in athleisure, this sequel purrs through a murder mystery in full Capri drag, teetering on the fine heel-point between deadly serious and deathly unserious.
Following the events of A Simple Favor, writer Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) is invited to glamorous Capri for the wedding of her enigmatic killer frenemy Emily (Blake Lively), who’s somehow free, fabulously dressed, and up to something shady once again.
Capri, perhaps the true star of the film, is gorgeous—an absurdly luxurious backdrop for a film that gleefully jettisons plot logic and emotional realism in favor of a sun-drenched buffet of fashion, flirtation, and florid deaths that no one seems too fussed about. There is a murder plot, sure, and various brutal deaths. But the real tension isn’t about who might die—it’s whether Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively are finally going to hate-kiss in a beautiful marble-floored hotel lobby.
This isn’t a thriller, so much as it’s a flirtation with homicide-as-lifestyle aesthetic. A glimmering piscine of bisexual tension, a Drag Race guest judge on a week where the challenge is “Millionaire Widow Realness.” Kendrick and Lively’s banter is all razor-edged affection, bristling with “fuck marry or kill” energy that’s far more potent than any of the actual plot. At one point Lively wears the biggest, most operatically ridiculous Capri hat the world has ever seen, and I derived as much of a thrill from whether she was going to be able to make it through a door as anything else that was going on. Murder, but make it fashion.
Henry Golding returns as the ex-husband, degenerated into a cynical lush whose main role is to knock back cocktails, roll his eyes, and occasionally stir the pot. As for Lively not being in jail after the last film’s antics? The script waves it off with the breezy confidence of someone tossing a silk scarf over one shoulder. Reality is not the concern here.
That’s really the film’s appeal. In hard times, why not suspend disbelief and just drift into a world of catty bisexual ludicrousness under the Mediterranean sun? If Elizabeth Taylor were still with us, she’d be watching this in bed, wrapped in a kaftan, scoffing chocolates without a care in the world. And did I mention Allison Janney is in this, playing a total bitch?
Is it good? In a traditional sense, who cares? You’ll have to have seen the first one to make any sense of the relationship between the main couple. But it’s fun. It’s unapologetic. It plays like Knives Out on three too many proseccos. It knows exactly what it is—high-gloss, high-camp hijinks with a dash of genuine derangement. And, frankly, we could all use more of that.
Another Simple Favor (or, for us Brits, Favour) is on Amazon Prime from 1 May 2025.
Whitlock&Pope 