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Another Simple Favor Is So Fun, Until It Gets So Dumb
By the end, the film doesn’t feel subversively strange, just self-consciously campy and irritatingly smug.
The effect may be a callback to the beginning of the first film, but more than that, it gives couture convict — a hilariously upscale riff on a prison uniform for a character who’d be sent to jail for murdering her father and her twin sister, shooting her husband, Sean (Henry Golding), and preparing to kill Stephanie herself, but who has turned up unaccountably free. The glee of A Simple Favor, which was directed by Paul Feig (who returns for the sequel) and adapted from a novel by Darcey Bell, is that it was just a lot stranger than it needed to be, electrified by undercurrents that turned what was basically a Gone Girl knockoff thriller into something far less predictable. The whole leadup to the ceremony is genuinely delicious, not just because of the decadent setting, where Emily’s outfits finally make sense, but because the characters all feel freed to sling unapologetically cunty insults at each other about the ridiculousness of what’s happening (Jessica Sharzer, who wrote the first script, is joined by Laeta Kalogridis for this sequel).
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