Anna Kendrick & Blake Lively in Sequel

Before the SXSW premiere of Another Simple Favor, Paul Feig admitted that he was reluctant to make a follow-up to his campy 2018 mystery A Simple Favor. Sequels, in his and many other people’s estimation, rarely live up to the standards of their predecessors.

Unfortunately, Another Simple Favor doesn’t prove to be the exception to that rule; fortunately, though, it won’t really matter to fans of the first film. In reviving one of the more toxic friendships in recent movie history, Feig reunites two stars whose chemistry makes this twisty, often very ridiculous and sometimes trying movie more compelling. 

Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reprise their roles as two women bonded at first by murder and then by other felonious activities. At the end of A Simple Favor, Emily (Lively) goes to prison and Stephanie (Kendrick) moonlights as a private detective, which makes her mommy vlog more interesting and extremely popular.

Another Simple Favor, written by Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis, begins a few years after these events. Stephanie has just published a book about her unbelievable friendship with Emily, and is preparing to send her son Miles (Joshua Satine), a precocious adolescent condemned to being an instrument for exposition, to camp. She’s also recently given up the true-crime life and shut down her vlog. Her book isn’t really selling and Stephanie, whether she wants to admit it or not, feels aimless. 

So it’s serendipitous when Emily appears at Stephanie’s sparsely attended book event to ask her former friend to be her maid of honor. She’s getting married to a very wealthy and mysterious Italian (Michele Morrone) in Capri. Stephanie is suspicious, but at the urging of her agent Vicky (Alex Newell) — who thinks the adventure will be good for the mommy vlogger’s brand — she agrees to participate.

The rest of Another Simple Favor takes place on the famous Tyrrhenian Sea island, where Stephanie learns that Emily’s new bae Dante is a powerful mafioso. Their union makes even less sense to her, but if audiences learned anything from A Simple Favor it’s that nothing is ever as it seems.

Feig amps up the irreverence, dialing up the foolishness to truly unserious levels. The narrative takes ever wilder turns, the glamour verges on gaudy and Emily’s hats really couldn’t get any bigger or floppier (the ace costuming is by Renee Ehrlich Kalfus). Reuniting with cinematographer John Schwartzman, Feig builds the film on its silliest moments. Unlike A Simple Favor, Another Simple Favor sets out to be unmistakable camp. When Emily walks into Stephanie’s book talk dressed in a gray two piece, recalling a jailbird costume, wrapped in silver chains and wearing earrings that look like deconstructed handcuffs, the film signals that it’s in on the joke. It’s as if Feig is saying “we’re not taking this too seriously, and neither should you.”

That framing is initially easy to accept, especially when Stephanie arrives in Capri and meets the rest of the guests. There’s a sweetness to her reunion with Emily’s son Nicky (Ian Ho), sporting a head of fiery red tips and black painted nails, who expresses how much he misses Miles. Stephanie’s encounters with Sean (Henry Golding) — Emily’s ex-husband and Stephanie’s own former beau — are more tart. He accurately describes himself as a malcontent and, after a failed attempt to sleep with Stephanie, spends the early days of the festivities spewing mean, drunken screeds. Golding gets to loosen up in this role, playing an unlikeable character with no filter.

Other invited guests include the head of the rival mob family (Lorenzo de Moor), Dante’s mother Portia (Elena Sofia Ricci), Emily’s mother (Elizabeth Perkins) and her aunt (Allison Janney). These side characters each get their moment and the actors make the most of their screen time. Perkins and Janney, especially, add memorable touches to this chaotic family reunion. (Credit must also go to Anita Pititto, who plays a scene-stealing hotel maid.)

These secondary characters and their side quests become so entertaining that they mask the narrative thinness of Another Simple Favor. Because the film starts off at a 10, it really has nowhere to go. Plot points are added, some are discarded and others are returned to as a matter of convenience. It doesn’t help that the screenplay relies on so much expository dialogue, giving some scenes a mechanical quality, and that the third act takes a truly perplexing, strangely desperate turn.

The death of a guest jolts the wedding party and reawakens Stephanie’s dormant private detective career. She starts observing her surroundings and the other partygoers more keenly. Meanwhile, she’s trying to figure out her relationship with Emily, whose invitation felt both genuine and threatening.

The friendship between these two is still the strongest part of the Simple Favor universe, and it’s really thanks to them that Another Simple Favor is watchable. Lively and Kendrick return to their roles with the confidence and curiosity of veterans. Kendrick’s comedic timing has never been sharper, and it’s obvious that Lively is having a blast. It’s a shame, then, that these characters and their friendship aren’t more deeply developed. In overemphasizing antics to justify its existence, Another Simple Favor nearly forgets the connection between the two women that started it all.