Like a cocktail made of ingredients that aren’t meant to go together, but that stimulate your taste buds in a just sweet-and-tart, gin-and-blood-orange enough way that you keep sipping it, “A Simple Favor” was a movie powered by its singular flavor. It started off as a bad-moms soap opera, with Anna Kendrick’s polite, perky, less-innocent-than-she-seemed Stephanie, a widowed mother who ran her own homemaking vlog, getting drawn into the web of Emily, a fellow grade-school parent who was about as maternal as Cruella de Vil, and who was played by Blake Lively in a performance of supremely entertaining nastiness.
As these two bonded over martinis and shared secrets (including the revelation that one of them was a “brother fucker” — an example of how blithe the film was about its own perversity), “A Simple Favor” morphed into a murderous mock noir. Yet even as the twists kept coming, the thriller outline was wrapped in the deadpan camp of desperate-housewives flamboyance. The joke, which was also not a joke, is that Kendrick’s eager-to-please Stephanie was obsessed with Emily — with the power of her cruelty, which Lively played as femme fatale coolness with a poison edge.
“A Simple Favor” was a hit in theaters and became a cult film in the seven years since. So it felt only natural to want to make a sequel to it. The director, Paul Feig (“Bridesmaids”), has returned, mixing what tries to be an even more deluxe version of that cocktail. Yet “Another Simple Favor,” which kicked off SXSW tonight, is a movie that offers more of the same, and not enough of it, and too much of it. The first film was set in Warwick, Conn., which gave it a small-town scuzziness. The new one is set in the luxe escapist climes of Capri, and it’s even more chockful of murder, decadent wealth, and twists you didn’t see coming. It’s like a flakier “Knives Out” sequel crossed with a cartoon gloss on “White Lotus.”
Emily, released from prison after having served time for killing her identical-twin sister, is heading to the fabulous Italian rock-island getaway because she’s about to be married to a sexy Continental mobster. Stephanie is now a true-crime author — she has written a book called “The Faceless Blonde,” about everything that happened in the first movie — and Emily shows up at one of her book events to ask Stephanie to be her maid of honor. What’s Emily’s motivation for this? Does she want to kill Stephanie? To entrap her in some way? That those are the most conceivable explanations, and that Stephanie is only too aware of all this, immediately sets the film off on a note that feels rigged, one that you just have to go with.
The biggest change, though, is that Kendrick is no longer playing Stephanie as a babe in the woods. She’s been schooled by her encounter with the darkness. Her vlog has morphed into a social-media show that deals with the details of true crime, and she’s too cynically wised-up to be lured into anyone’s web. But this means that the movie loses the crucial dimension of her innocence. She is now a hard case unraveling the schemes of a woman who’s an even harder case. That lends “Another Simple Favor” a certain samey-sameness.
As soon as everyone arrives in Italy, the bad stuff starts to happen. It begins with the appearance of Emily’s ex, Sean (Henry Golding), who has become a miserable drunk, even as he’s taking sole care of the couple’s son, Nicky (Ian Ho), who is now a sullen tween with crimson highlights. Dante, the crime-family scion Emily is marrying, who is played by the Italian matinee idol Michele Morrone (from the “365 Days” erotic thrillers), comes off as both a stud and a sucker. There are creepy relatives hanging around, played by a spaced-out Elizabeth Perkins and a devious Allison Janney. Then people start getting killed: a fatal injection in the shower, someone who gets shot and falls into an exploding brickhouse of fireworks, and plenty of knives out.
Stephanie, though the movie makes clear she has nothing to do with any of this, gets accused of perpetrating some of the crimes. It’s up to her to play detective again, even as she’s placed under house arrest. It’s all very worked out on paper — the script is by Jessica Sharzer, who wrote the first film, collaborating this time with Laeta Kalogridis. Yet “Another Simple Plan” feels, in a way that the first movie didn’t, like an elaborate kitsch-crime schematic that the performers are going through the motions acting out. You could say that a “Knives Out” movie is just as unreal, but we go to that sort of retro-hip Agatha Christie thriller to revel in the cleverness. “Another Simple Plan” is certainly busy, but it’s more labored than clever.
The first movie sprung the twist on us that Emily had faked her own death, murdering her twin sister. “Another Simple Favor” gets into even more elaborate sibling complications. In design, it’s just loony and “crowd-pleasing” enough, I think, to be another hit. (Blink and you’ll miss the message about tolerance.) The “Simple Favor” films fill a niche, one that they helped create: the knowing synthetic thriller rooted in the angst of contempo motherhood. But this one both diverts and drags on.
