"A Simple Favor" - Review

Ah, the mid-budget mystery thriller. Such a staple of the mid to late ‘90s – how else was HBO going to fill most of its programming block? Much like the romantic comedy, this particular genre has been out of fashion for a while now, and I’ve been disappointed for the last decade or so that these type of movies haven’t been getting made. However, thanks to movies like Gone Girl, and TV series like Big Little Lies, this kind of thing is coming back. A Simple Favor is a fun comedic version of the kind of thing that would play on HBO in the ‘90s, and it’s a blast from start to finish.
 
Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) is a straight-laced single mother and mommy vlogger living in a small Connecticut town. Stephanie is known around town as the go-getter who volunteers for almost every school project (such as bake sales). One day she meets Emily Nelson (Blake Lively), a glamorous PR executive because their sons, Miles (Joshua Satine) and Nicky (Ian Ho), are friends at school. Stephanie and Emily become fast friends, but Emily is cagey about her past and even flips out if a picture is taken of her. Then one day, Emily asks Stephanie for a favor — pick Nicky up from school — and then disappears for four days. Stephanie then starts to investigate her friend’s past and starts a relationship with her husband, Sean (Henry Golding). The resulting mystery is full of twists and turns that’s a joy to watch unfold – even as those twists become more and more ridiculous.
 
As I said up front, A Simple Favor is just plain fun. The mystery concerning Emily’s disappearance, while totally absurd, is thoroughly compelling. Watching Stephanie morph from straight-laced mommy blogger to detective is a very fun arc, and Anna Kendrick plays it with everything she’s got, but also plays some sweet emotional moments where she has to be a mother. Blake Lively is having a ball vamping it up as a mysterious femme fatale. Lively and Kendrick have great chemistry with each other, and I hope to see more movies with this duo. Henry Golding continues to do his Cary Grant routine that we saw from last month’s Crazy Rich Asians, and he’s utterly charming  — but he manages to bring a hint of danger to the table here, which adds to the noir-ish proceedings. Rupert Friend is hilarious as the bitchy head of the PR Company Emily works for, and Linda Cardellini comes in as a bitter artist who has a past with Emily. Both performances are funny and bring tension to the film.
 
The script by Jessica Sharzer (based on the novel by Darcey Bell) keeps the tone light, but when the script moves into heavier, darker territory it doesn’t shy away from that either. What Sharzer doesn’t do (which I appreciated, but other people might not) is the big final twist, where the rug is pulled from under the audience.
 
Paul Feig’s direction keeps things moving at a nice clip, and he stages some of the more intense sequences with aplomb. However, sometimes Feig will undercut a tense situation with a joke, and those moments are not entirely successful. The movie might just have one too many twists and turns for its own good — there’s a double cross that happens at one point and I was sort of confused as to who was doing what to whom.
 
But on the whole the film is fun, bolstered by strong performances by Kendrick and Lively, and it scratches that mid-budget thriller itch that movie fans have been feeling for too long.
 

Three out of Four stars.