Patricia Harper

Let’s start with the obvious: Another Simple Favor is not a movie. It’s a tax write-off in a cocktail dress. A stitched-together mess of spy tropes, bisexual breadcrumbs, and jokes so strained they should’ve been on vocal rest. This sequel doesn’t build on the first film — it digs it up, props it against a wall, and puppets the corpse around for two hours while everyone pretends not to notice the smell. Let’s talk about Blake Lively. She’s not acting—she’s doing drag as Blake Lively, thinking that a trench coat and a sarcastic smirk count as range. Every scene she’s in feels like she just snorted a line of Vogue editorials and declared war on subtlety. It’s all hats and posturing and absolutely zero human behavior. She delivers her lines with the smug detachment of someone who just learned what a metaphor is and won’t stop using them incorrectly. She’s not acting so much as announcing — every scene a new opportunity to remind us she used to be interesting. At one point she fakes her own death. Again. At this point, it’s less a plot twist and more a cry for help. Anna Kendrick, on the other hand, is doing Shakespeare in a Chuck E. Cheese. She is *working*. Still funny. Still trying to thread a coherent performance through a plot that reads like it was co-authored by a drunk intern and a malfunctioning Roomba. You can see the exact moment she realizes this sequel has no plot, no stakes, and no reason to exist — but like a true professional, she powers through. She deserves an Oscar for making this travesty even remotely watchable. The writing? Imagine if an algorithm was trained on three spy thrillers, two BuzzFeed quizzes, and the word “quirky.” The dialogue is allergic to silence — everyone’s quipping like they’re afraid of being left alone with their thoughts. And the plot… well. You know that feeling when you walk into a conversation halfway through and everyone’s already drunk? It’s that, but somehow longer. By the end, you don’t care who’s double-crossing who or why there’s suddenly a fashion show in the middle of a money laundering subplot. You just want Anna Kendrick to be rescued by a better script and Blake Lively to be reminded that charisma isn’t just standing still and smirking like you’re about to insult a waiter. And my god. That hat.