“Another Simple Favor” Can’t Solve This Mystery
To a certain extent, all sequels must justify their existence. That’s the burden of taking an existing story that had a neat, tidy ending and bringing it to life again. Some sequels are easier to justify than others. Maybe they come from a series of books or video games and the first installment left more of that world to be discovered. Or maybe the first film earned the studio a lot of money and now they want to see if there’s any profit that can come from bringing a story back from the dead. Paul Feig’s Another Simple Favor is an example of the latter. Critics often lament a direct-to-streaming release for its lack of fanfare and fleeting nature, but in the case of Another Simple Favor, this choice feels apt.
Another Simple Favor doesn’t tell the audience exactly how much time has elapsed since the events of the prior film, but given how much Stephanie’s (Anna Kendrick) son, Miles (Miles Smothers), has aged, it’s likely similar to the real-life seven years between movies. Since solving the disappearance of Emily Nelson, aka Hope McLanden (Blake Lively), Stephanie has struggled to maintain her online popularity. She still does the Mommy blogging and wrote a book about the whole ordeal, but once Hope ended up in jail, Stephanie’s life became fairly boring. Until, that is, Hope saunters back in and asks Stephanie to be the maid of honor at her destination wedding in Italy. With the help of some light blackmail, Stephanie agrees, only to find herself in the middle of yet another mystery at the hands of Hope McLanden.
Credit: Lorenzo Sisti Copyright: © 2025 Amazon Content Services LLC
Going back to this review’s initial statement that a sequel must prove its worth, it’s quite difficult to say that Another Simple Favor has achieved that burden of proof. That’s not to say that it couldn’t have. There was magic in A Simple Favor that came from the crackling back-and-forth between Kendrick and Lively. The dialogue in the first film allowed their bickering to border on flirting, hurling insults and barbs through suburban niceties. Perhaps the reason that same dynamic doesn’t sizzle as much in Another Simple Favor is because the veil has been dropped. By trading the cookie-cutter world of PTAs and school drop-offs for the awe-inspiring vistas of Capri, Another Simple Favor has lost something essential. It is no longer the suburban Hitchcock thriller it longs to be, and instead lifelessly tries to light the spark of the first film with kindling that’s too wet to ever catch fire again.
© 2025 Amazon Content Services LLC
Another Simple Favor’s greatest weapon is still Kendrick’s comedic timing. After a string of more dramatic films, it’s nice to laugh along with her again. Kendrick has the ability to hang with the best in drama, but comedy is where she really comes alive. In one scene that comes later in the film, Kendrick’s Stephanie is trying to fight off the effects of a truth serum. The two-minute scene shows her riffing, and it provides the film’s most amusing sequence. So much humor comes out of this moment because it’s one of the few times the movie isn’t resting on the laurels of the first film. There are only so many times someone can say “brother fucker” before it loses all meaning, and Another Simple Favor hits that quota extremely early in its runtime. There was more charm to A Simple Favor than this rhyming nickname, but it seems that’s all anyone can remember. As one might expect, Another Simple Favor builds upon the idea of “brother fucker,” but it does it in a way that sucks all the air out of the room. How exactly they expand upon the sentiment is a massive spoiler that will not be revealed here, but know that it’s a deeply inappropriate choice that’s far too flippantly discussed in the world of the film.
Without proving its purpose with this sequel, Another Simple Favor ends with the winking promise that a third installment could be on the horizon. Perhaps this sequel was growing pains and the expanded world introduced in this film will ease itself into something truly grand. Only time will tell, but for now, Another Simple Favor proves to be another example of sequel fatigue.
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