Another Simple Favor (2025) Movie Review: An Elegant Vacation To Leave You More Exhausted Than Relaxed

Paul Feig’s 2016 remake of “Ghostbusters” wasn’t even remotely the disastrous insult to comedy that the misogynistic smear campaign of the time would have you believe—though it would be difficult to classify the film as “good” in any case—but the resulting shit-storm of publicity surrounding its release seemed to have left its mark on the one studio director who saw real comedic potential in Melissa McCarthy beyond cheap punchlines about her weight. This much was apparent in the immediate aftermath, when “A Simple Favor” rolled around as Feig’s answer to the internet chauvinists, switching gears and doubling down on the feminine sensibilities for a sweet and sour twist on the domestic mystery film.

A film that aimed for elegant and delightfully twisty melodrama, Feig’s 2018 adaptation of Darcey Bell’s novel read more like an entire season of daytime soap opera condensed into feature length: too convoluted for its own good and disposable as all hell, but competent enough to pass a few idle hours. “Another Simple Favor,” meanwhile, comes seven years later and smack in the middle of the streaming era (this one being a Prime Video original), meaning that everything must be more—more lavish, more intricate, and more bloated. What’s decreased in the interim is the willpower to stay invested.

“Another Simple Favor” picks up roughly where its predecessor left off, as part-time internet sleuth Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) has spun her investigative antics into a successful career of partial fame. Her crowning achievement is the true-crime novelization of her experience with the murderous Emily (Blake Lively); cue the “Previously On…” montage that would have fit right in. It’s at a public reading of this very book that Emily saunters into the room to the flash of cell phone cameras and indulgent slow motion to announce her sudden conditional release from prison.

Another Simple Favor (2025) — A still from “Another Simple Favor” (2025)

Given her past behavior, everyone (including Stephanie) expects right off the bat that Emily has come to take gruesome revenge on the woman who put her in jail and separated her from her son, but the psychopath instead comes bearing a proposition. Her release from prison, it turns out, has been facilitated by the lawyers of her obscenely rich Italian fiancé (Michele Morrone), and Emily wants Stephanie to fly over with her to Capri to be her maid of honor. Now, why anybody decides to do anything in this film is an utter mystery that requires the greatest suspension of disbelief, but Emily’s threat of a lawsuit for profiting off her image is a sensible enough reason to send Stephanie on the private jet bound for the Italian coast.

Truly, this development is just about the most coherent choice that comes out of “Another Simple Favor,” as Feig and his screenwriters Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis luxuriate in the progressive mind-numbing excess of their narrative. In its desire to go bigger in virtually every regard, the film packs on an endless series of side characters and motivations, not least of which include a burgeoning mafioso gang war and the sudden introduction of Emily’s vacant mother (Elizabeth Perkins) and her mysterious aunt Linda (Allison Janney).

Beginning in media res with Stephanie under house arrest for the murder of Emily’s husband, the film is already prepped and ready to go all-in on the unapologetic melodrama that drove its predecessor to moderate success. Feig thus ensures that “Another Simple Favor” is never taking itself any more seriously than its frequent twisty developments would allow, with plenty of downtime amidst the drama for oddly placed (and occasionally functional) humor; one bit with the hotel housekeeper proves to be intermittently enjoyable.

It’s really, in that sense, Kendrick and Lively’s continuously solid chemistry that keeps the film as consistently watchable as the one that came before, but all of these add-ons—an apparent necessity for a sequel to a film whose biggest selling-point was its immoderation—only really serve to dilute what often works with the two of them simply standing opposite one another, sizing up their respective survival instincts. It doesn’t help, either, that Stephanie, supposedly renowned for her scrappy powers of deduction, needs everything explained to her when the time comes for the film to unravel its tangled mess of a plot.

Not that she can be blamed for needing to be spoon-fed these inane developments, for “Another Simple Favor” reaches far past the realm of Almodóvar-ian absurdity without any of the distinctive spice that makes a lasting melodrama stick beyond disposable diversion. (Worth noting is that the film’s main twist does keep up a surprising trend that has been permeating through the performances in film this year.) In keeping with the porcelain-like soap opera sheen that surrounded the previous entry, Paul Feig crafts a boisterously shinier sequel, one too blinding in its polish to make a deeper look at the clues much more than a headache-in-the-making.