Another Simple Favor (2025) isn’t just a misfire—it’s a symptom of the growing problem with streaming-era content. What once felt like an opportunity to tell smaller, riskier stories has increasingly become a dumping ground for shallow IP extensions that lack any creative spark. This is not a thriller. It’s not even really a movie. It’s plain, dull, and disposable “content.”
‘Another Simple Favor’ Movie Review
Another Simple Favor is an exhausting, misguided sequel that not only squanders the pulpy energy of its predecessor, A Simple Favor, but also cements itself as one of the worst examples of how the streaming era has commodified sequels into shallow, disposable content. Directed once again by Paul Feig, this Amazon Prime Video release limps along with little sense of direction, logic, or purpose. It’s an empty retread of a story that never needed a second chapter.
The original A Simple Favor somewhat worked in large part because of its unexpected tonal balance: a glossy suburban mystery, with Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick (Self Reliance, Woman of the Hour) fully leaning into the heightened weirdness of their characters. It was never a great film, but it had a flair for the dramatic and a sense of fun that at least earned it a cult following. That film ended with Lively’s Emily behind bars for murder and manipulation, having burned every bridge with Kendrick’s perky, compulsively vlogging Stephanie.
In Another Simple Favor, all of that is ignored or undone. Emily is out of prison on appeal and planning to marry a rich Italian man on a remote island. Out of nowhere, she asks Stephanie to be her maid of honor—and for reasons never convincingly explained, Stephanie says yes. It’s a baffling premise that immediately undercuts any lingering goodwill from the first film and sets the tone for a movie that gets more nonsensical by the minute.
There’s no real mystery this time, just a tired cycle of half-baked twists, underwritten new characters, and dramatic showdowns that play more like bad fan fiction than an actual screenplay. The plot is convoluted, the stakes are unearned, and the pacing lurches between exposition dumps and cringeworthy action sequences, including a finale that devolves into a cartoonish shootout involving family members and a bizarre inheritance scheme. It’s not fun, it’s not clever—it’s just bad.
The acting, which once helped carry the first film’s campy tone, now feels strained. Blake Lively’s aloof confidence has curdled into caricature, while Anna Kendrick’s chipper awkwardness feels shoehorned into a plot that doesn’t support it. The supporting cast (most of them new) are lifeless and interchangeable. Meanwhile, the CGI is shockingly poor for a film from a major studio, further exposing the budget-conscious, corner-cutting nature of so many straight-to-streaming sequels.
Perhaps worst of all, the movie seems convinced it’s being edgy or stylish, teasing yet another sequel in a final scene that’s both tonally dissonant and entirely unearned. The promise of more of these films is not exciting—it’s exhausting. The franchise has officially overstayed its welcome, devolving into a parody of itself.
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Another Simple Favor isn’t just a misfire—it’s a symptom of the growing problem with streaming-era content. What once felt like an opportunity to tell smaller, riskier stories has increasingly become a dumping ground for shallow IP extensions that lack any creative spark. This is not a thriller. It’s not even really a movie. It’s plain, dull, and disposable “content.”
Score: 2/10
Another Simple Favor (2025)
- Cast: Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively, Michele Morrone, Henry Golding, Allison Janney, Elizabeth Perkins
- Director: Paul Feig
- Genre: Comedy, Crime, Thriller
- Runtime: 123 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: May 1, 2025
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