☆☆☆
Two strangers agree to swap murders. An old woman kills a lost traveler. A hated rich man is found dead on a train. The best murder mysteries are simple to describe and extraordinarily complex to explain, yet elegantly simple once they are unraveled. You should have seen them coming.
A Simple Favor meets two of the criteria so well that it's frustrating to see the fall so short of the third in its critical final act. The trouble isn't so much that the movie should have been better than it is, it's that most of it is so much better than it turns out to be.
Here's the setup: Two moms -- one perfect (Anna Kendrick) and one far from it (Blake Lively) -- become best friends, and just as they start goading each other to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets, one of them disappears into thin air.
How? Where? Why? It's high-powered New York City fashionista and PR director Emily who disappears and seemingly simple, Polly Perfect single mom Stephanie who is left behind and turns herself into Nancy Drew (or maybe Veronica Mars) to get to the bottom of what happened. Meanwhile, there's Emily's slightly less-than-distraught husband Sean (Henry Golding), who seems to have equally less-than-noble intentions, while his young son Nicky starts insisting with increasing certainty that he's seen Emily lurking around.
There's a lot going on here, and the script by Jessica Sharzer (based on a novel by Darcey Bell) is not afraid to come right out and name-check both Diabolique and Gaslight. You've got to be pretty confident to reference movies of that caliber, and for a great long time, director Paul Feig is nothing if not confident.
Like his ridiculously good Spy, A Simple Favor is a comedy-genre mash-up that doesn't skimp on either: It excels at comedy, but its central story is legitimate and fulfilling. The murder-mystery at the heart of A Simple Favor is a good one, but can't be content to present a straightforward whodunit -- it wants to be a stylish, fashionable mystery that deals in the sort of twisty, unpredictable plots of thrillers like Gone Girl and Girl on a Train, so it piles on revelation after revelation until it feels like a parody of itself, and not the good kind of parody.
It has a great premise and an extraordinarily complicated explanation -- but try to piece it all together in your head afterward, and most if it won't make any sense.
At just about the time it should be shocking us, A Simple Favor becomes a bit of a head-scratcher. There's one scene in particular set in a cemetery that is no doubt intended as a triple-twist jaw-dropper but ends up as a weird eleventh-hour head-scratcher: Why is that person saying those things, and why does the other person seem so unbothered? And when the final moments of the movie attempt some ironic humor, it comes at the expense of logic and fulfillment: Shouldn't that character face a much worse fate?
Most audience members (myself included) would benefit from a scorecard to keep track of all of the characters and their motives, and one utterly unnecessary detour that attempts some odd combination of Gothic melodrama and mild character humor falls entirely flat.
So, why recommend A Simple Favor? That's easy: Kendrick and Lively, who are pitch perfect in everything they do, even managing to pull off the over-the-top ending. But it's the beginning that matters most, and these two actresses radiate such chemistry on screen that they need to be cast again in something even better. They lift A Simple Favor in remarkable ways: funny, smart, knowing, ironic, sincere, clever, biting, daring, even shocking, they are the reason to see -- and to recommend -- A Simple Favor.
Viewed September 15, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 16
1930
A Simple Favor meets two of the criteria so well that it's frustrating to see the fall so short of the third in its critical final act. The trouble isn't so much that the movie should have been better than it is, it's that most of it is so much better than it turns out to be.
Here's the setup: Two moms -- one perfect (Anna Kendrick) and one far from it (Blake Lively) -- become best friends, and just as they start goading each other to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets, one of them disappears into thin air.
How? Where? Why? It's high-powered New York City fashionista and PR director Emily who disappears and seemingly simple, Polly Perfect single mom Stephanie who is left behind and turns herself into Nancy Drew (or maybe Veronica Mars) to get to the bottom of what happened. Meanwhile, there's Emily's slightly less-than-distraught husband Sean (Henry Golding), who seems to have equally less-than-noble intentions, while his young son Nicky starts insisting with increasing certainty that he's seen Emily lurking around.
There's a lot going on here, and the script by Jessica Sharzer (based on a novel by Darcey Bell) is not afraid to come right out and name-check both Diabolique and Gaslight. You've got to be pretty confident to reference movies of that caliber, and for a great long time, director Paul Feig is nothing if not confident.
Like his ridiculously good Spy, A Simple Favor is a comedy-genre mash-up that doesn't skimp on either: It excels at comedy, but its central story is legitimate and fulfilling. The murder-mystery at the heart of A Simple Favor is a good one, but can't be content to present a straightforward whodunit -- it wants to be a stylish, fashionable mystery that deals in the sort of twisty, unpredictable plots of thrillers like Gone Girl and Girl on a Train, so it piles on revelation after revelation until it feels like a parody of itself, and not the good kind of parody.
It has a great premise and an extraordinarily complicated explanation -- but try to piece it all together in your head afterward, and most if it won't make any sense.
At just about the time it should be shocking us, A Simple Favor becomes a bit of a head-scratcher. There's one scene in particular set in a cemetery that is no doubt intended as a triple-twist jaw-dropper but ends up as a weird eleventh-hour head-scratcher: Why is that person saying those things, and why does the other person seem so unbothered? And when the final moments of the movie attempt some ironic humor, it comes at the expense of logic and fulfillment: Shouldn't that character face a much worse fate?
Most audience members (myself included) would benefit from a scorecard to keep track of all of the characters and their motives, and one utterly unnecessary detour that attempts some odd combination of Gothic melodrama and mild character humor falls entirely flat.
So, why recommend A Simple Favor? That's easy: Kendrick and Lively, who are pitch perfect in everything they do, even managing to pull off the over-the-top ending. But it's the beginning that matters most, and these two actresses radiate such chemistry on screen that they need to be cast again in something even better. They lift A Simple Favor in remarkable ways: funny, smart, knowing, ironic, sincere, clever, biting, daring, even shocking, they are the reason to see -- and to recommend -- A Simple Favor.
Viewed September 15, 2018 -- AMC Burbank 16
1930
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