“Another Simple Favor” is a textbook example of what I call the Location Vacation Movie: a film so dreadful that it’s a mystery why actors of any credibility would have signed on - until you realize they’re getting paid to spend three or four weeks in a gorgeous setting, with hotels and meals covered. I’d go, and probably so would you - who needs a script?
There certainly isn’t one in this painfully unnecessary sequel to 2018’s “A Simple Favor,” a dark mystery-comedy of mismatched female bonding that was a sizable hit and that gave a welcome boost to its stars, Anna Kendrick (as tightly wound mouseburger mom Stephanie Smothers) and Blake Lively (as amoral, martini-guzzling party mom Emily Nelson). That film ended - cover your eyes if you didn’t see it and don’t want spoilers - with Emily going to jail for the murder of her twin sister and the attempted murder of her husband, Sean (Henry Golding), and Stephanie. Meanwhile, Stephanie freed her inner bad mama and became a true-crime podcast celebrity.
You would think that would have been the end of it, but no. The stars have regathered, along with director Paul Feig, to somehow spring Emily from jail - it’s never convincingly explained how or why the character’s been granted parole, but there’s the American justice system for you - and head to Capri, off the coast of Italy, for her lavish wedding to Dante (Michele Morrone), a former boyfriend with the physique of a romance-novel cover model and the mob ties of Vito Corleone. For a dash of further implausibility, Emily asks Stephanie to be her maid of honor, notwithstanding that her onetime best friend is the reason she went to jail in the first place.
Why? Does Emily have revenge in mind or something even darker? Don’t ask because no one here seems to know, and, anyway, Capri is calling and it looks great. There we’re reintroduced to Emily’s ex, Sean, now somehow transformed from a genteel novelist to a vulgar drunk, and Emily’s demented born-again mother, played by poor Elizabeth Perkins in a blond wig because the first film’s Jean Smart lived up to her name and got out while she could.
New characters include Dante’s silky, homicidal Mafia mamma (Elena Sofia Ricci, the classiest thing in a bargain-basement movie); Emily’s Aunt Linda (Allison Janney), who’s too nice to not be up to something; and Stephanie’s agent/assistant Vicky (Alex Newell of “Glee”), who’s here to fill the plus-size Black lady comic relief slot and is forced to spout reaction lines (“Lord have mercy!”) like the second coming of Hattie McDaniel.
The locations, as mentioned, are lovely. A number of scenes double as full-on wedding porn, and Renee Ehrlich Kalfus’s costumes for Emily are entertainingly over the moon enough to almost make “Another Simple Favor” bearable. At around the midpoint, after someone gets killed, and then another someone, you’re inclined to stick around just to see how the filmmakers climb out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves. Anita Pititto has a very funny couple of scenes as an annoyed maid.
Those are the good points. But the screenplay, dear God, the screenplay. Written by the first film’s Jessica Sharzer with Laeta Kalogridis (“Shutter Island”), and based on characters in Darcey Bell’s original 2017 novel, it is a cringe contest of forced banter, bald exposition, dialogue that sags rather than snaps and plot developments that don’t twist so much as spiral into incredulity like a failed SpaceX launch.
The two stars do what they can. For Kendrick, that involves a lot of heavy lifting to make Stephanie’s moments of peril seem giddy and lighthearted; the dialogue is dire, but she wrings a few laughs from the quicksilver spin she gives it. Lively, who was the first movie’s antic ace in the hole, has less to work with, since no one here seems able to decide whether Emily is to be pitied or sent back to prison. The film’s lighting and makeup flatter neither actress, but that’s a minor offense compared with the assault and battery represented by the movie as a whole.
