“Another Simple Favor” escapes the pedestrian upscale suburban setting of its predecessor, flying (via private plane, naturally) to Capri, Italy, though not until after we learn that Stephanie has pivoted to true crime vlogging and writing, and Emily has figured out how to get out of her prison sentence, and is marrying a glamorous and rich Italian. Naturally she wants Stephanie, her bosom frenemy, to be her maid of honor. So off to the island they go, where things go extremely sideways.
No one is more regretful than me to announce that “Another Simple Favor” is not as bananas as the first film. It was inevitable. The element of surprise is gone, for one thing: “A Simple Favor” was just so plain weird, so far afield of the vibe most people were expecting — what is this psychotic and vaguely erotic movie, and does it know how demented it is? — that the whole thing wound up feeling fresh. You had to lock into its vibe to appreciate it, but in the right frame of mind, it was a pleasure.
The new film can’t repeat that. It is charming, to be sure, with the kind of allure that comes from a script (written by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis) seemingly engineered to compel a movie studio to foot the bill for a couple of months in some stunning sunny location. (See also “Mamma Mia,” “The White Lotus,” “Glass Onion.”) I mean that with admiration, and, let’s be real, some envy.
But the twists and turns get tedious after a while, and the big reveal is telegraphed too soon for it to be fun. There are side quests with a bumbling F.B.I. agent (Taylor Ortega) and Emily’s fiancé’s fearsome mother (Elena Sofia Ricci), but they’re not around enough to feel important. And now that we know the main characters, we know how they’re going to act. Even the addition of Allison Janney as Emily’s crafty Aunt Linda and Elizabeth Perkins (replacing Jean Smart) as Emily’s mother can’t inject a lot of extra life into the story.
Yet there’s still some fun to be had. Despite their trappings, the “Simple Favor” movies don’t really tell those deadly serious “rich people problems” stories — the sort “Big Little Lies” exemplifies. Maybe it’s just that Kendrick and Lively are millennials, or maybe it’s because Emily and Stephanie are scrambling to get into the social class where people have those kinds of problems. There actually is something at stake for these women, which frees them up for a desperate kind of humor, in the vein of those plucky social climbers in a screwball comedy from an earlier era.
