‘Another Simple Favor’ review: Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively return for uninspired sequel

Dir: Paul Feig. US. 2025. 120mins 

Anna Kendrick’s timid single mom and Blake Lively’s bold schemer reunite in Another Simple Favor, a twistier and far less entertaining sequel. Seven years after A Simple Favor, these frenemies head off to Capri for a glitzy wedding, which gets interrupted by random murders and wild double-crosses. Director Paul Feig brings the same sly approach to this lavish follow-up, but the results feel even more strained than the original, which was often more stylish than deliciously diabolical. 

The original’s convoluted plotting proves even more disjointed this time around

The film opens this year’s SXSW, the festival that launched two of Feig’s biggest hits, Bridesmaids ($325m worldwide) and Spy ($236m). A Simple Favor, which was based on Darcey Bell’s 2017 novel, grossed an impressive $98m on a modest budget, but this bloodier second chapter will be released exclusively on Prime Video on May 1. Kendrick and Lively’s star power should once again be a draw, and regular viewers of The White Lotus should also connect with a story of fabulously rich people in beautiful locales who have a nasty habit of winding up dead.

Stephanie (Kendrick) is now a successful author who has written a nonfiction book about the incidents dramatised in A Simple Favor: how she became obsessed with glamorous fellow mother Emily (Lively), who turned out to be concocting a scam to extricate herself from ineffectual husband Sean (Henry Golding). That film ended with Emily being sent to prison, so Stephanie is stunned to learn that Emily is now free — her lawyers got her out early — and has invited Stephanie to her wedding in Capri. Still a single working mom, Stephanie wants nothing to do with this criminal, but Emily insists she be her maid of honour — or she will sue Stephanie for using her name and likeness in her book without permission.

That flimsy rationale to get Stephanie and Emily back together highlights the nagging plot problems that litter Another Simple Favor. Wary of Emily’s ulterior motives, Stephanie nonetheless flies to the gorgeous Italian island, where she meets Emily’s hunky, wealthy fiance Dante (Michele Morrone), a member of one of Capri’s feuding mob families. Stephanie also encounters Sean, now a disillusioned drunk, and Emily’s mentally scattered older mother Margaret (Elizabeth Perkins, replacing Jean Smart from the original film). Before the nuptials can take place, however, a shocking death occurs — the local police dismiss it as an accident, but Stephanie suspects foul play and is determined to find the killer.

A Simple Favor examined the pressures of motherhood, the complexity of female friendships and the banality of smalltown life, all the while costuming its two leads in the sharpest, most elegant outfits imaginable. (Costume designer Renee Ehrlich Kalfus returns for this new instalment, once again delivering one knockout ensemble after another.) But the original film’s superficial treatment of its themes was at least bolstered by the shifting power dynamics between nerdy Stephanie and worldly Emily, who treated her insecure new friend almost like a pet — until Stephanie became aware of how she was being manipulated as part of Emily’s elaborate con. 

Perhaps inevitably, Another Simple Favor loses that element of surprise. Everyone in the audience, as well as Stephanie, knows not to trust Emily, which makes Stephanie’s decision to attend the wedding nonsensical — clearly, it’s merely an excuse to justify the new film’s existence and the twists to come. In the process, the original film’s observations about how women must battle to have an identity outside of being a mother gets pushed aside for a labyrinthine whodunit involving two murders and numerous suspects.

Kendrick does have a few adorkable moments — Stephanie is funniest when she is in over her head dealing with imposing gangsters or dopey FBI agents — but Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis’ screenplay focuses on red herrings over character, resulting in an empty murder mystery that too often keeps Stephanie and Emily cut off from one another. (Lively mostly rehashes Emily’s flirty condescension, robbing this master scammer of her spark.) Of the sequel’s new cast members, Allison Janney makes the biggest impact as Emily’s long-lost Aunt Linda, who may be hatching her own nefarious plot. 

The first film led with its sumptuous aesthetic choices, accented by John Schwartzman’s slick lensing and a fleet of vintage French pop songs on the soundtrack. Feig has recruited several of his A Simple Favor collaborators, including Schwartzman, for this more picturesque crime comedy with its sun-splashed locales and impossibly blue waters. (The sequel was shot at Italy’s Cinecitta.) But the original’s convoluted plotting proves even more disjointed this time around, the drab nods to bygone Hollywood gems like North By Northwest merely underlining what is so uninspired here. Stephanie will come to regret letting Emily back into her life — viewers may feel a similar remorse about revisiting these characters.