Another Simple Favour, review: Film noir sequel that's riper and slipperier than a brown banana

Telegraph

30-04-2025

Film noir is a famously shadowy genre, but one of the great joys of 2018's A Simple Favour is that it less resembled The Big Sleep or Double Indemnity than a Real Housewives docusoap. From its sunny suburban setting to its cartoon-chic costumes, Paul Feig's comic adaptation of Darcey Bell's novel didn't just capture the pleasures of a schlocky page-turning mystery, but also the fun of tearing through one with an eyebrow raised. Every twist was equal parts slinky and ludicrous – and boy, did they look it.
This even sillier, less memorable sequel, which is bypassing cinemas for Amazon Prime, stretches the approach to snapping point. Riper and slipperier than a brown banana, it packs Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick's eternal school-run frenemies off to Capri for the former's wedding: never mind that the last time we saw Lively's Emily, she'd just landed in prison for a 20-year stretch. This most fatale of femmes' early release has been secured by a rich and influential Italian fiancé (Michele Morrone) – an old flame who flickered back into view in the intervening years.
True to psychotic drama-queen form, Emily asks Kendrick's Stephanie to be her maid of honour – and Stephanie, whose new career as a true-crime author could do with a publicity boost, warily accepts. Of course, she might end up murdered. But this online mumfleuncer knows there's power in #numbers – and the additional clicks the trip will bring to her livestream are too potentially lucrative to pass up.
Since the release of the first film, Lively has weathered something of a domestic noir nightmare herself – an orchestrated cancellation campaign following a high-profile feud with Justin Baldoni, the director of her 2024 drama It Ends With Us. (Baldoni's lawyer described accusations from Lively in a legal complaint, as 'serious and categorically false'.)
But that makes it doubly satisfying to see the actress on such raucously unhinged form here: there's something of Barbara Stanwyck in her weaponisation of glamour and bad-girl sexual ambiguity – and her outrageous wardrobe, again created by Renee Ehrlich Kalfus, is itself a plentiful source of shocks and punchlines. (While drifting through Capri incognita, she sports a sun hat the size of a radar dish.)
As before, Kendrick is a winningly perky foil for Lively's mad machinations, and there's much fun to be had as both actresses snipe at one another from behind an increasingly tattered pretence of mutual bestie-ship. The mystery at hand is messier still: in an opening livestream, Stephanie announces she has been framed for the murder of Emily's new husband, who was somehow dispatched during the wedding banquet itself. But the plotting often mistakes wackiness for a lack of discipline. Promising supporting characters (not least a long-lost aunt played by Allison Janney) are feebly sketched, while the twists are sometimes arbitrary, sometimes obvious replicas of the original's various scandalous gambits.
Yet Feig and his collaborators' poison-tipped instincts still hit the mark often enough: I had to stifle a guilty chuckle when one of Kendrick's prior true-crime scalps, a pervert who inveigled his way into a children's swimming club, is soberly referred to as 'the Speedo Paedo'. And the Kendrick-Lively double-act at its core remains a toxic treat. Pack these two off to St Tropez, Mustique, the Maldives, Skegness, wherever – I'll watch.