Introducing SXSW’s opening movie this year in Austin, the film & TV festival’s director said when they screened Another Simple Favor back in October, the festival organizers immediately knew that it would be the opener in 2025- specifically saying that it is unequivocally a “South by Southwest movie.”
What that means may vary for viewers but in my six years of covering the festival, the one major throughline for most of the openers is that they are very good, if not the best movie of the fest.
While Paul Feig’s sequel to his 2018 hit A Simple Favor with Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick may not be the next Everything Everywhere All At Once (or even John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place or Jordan Peele’s Us for that matter), it at least keeps pulling the thread, living up to the high expectations that the festival has earned.
Aside from a few moments with references to the first movie’s plot, it is largely a standalone story. New viewers will miss out on the evolution of Henry Golding’s character in a drunken mess, but that alone is an exciting piece in the peripheries, and no context is truly needed.
Neither is context required to witness the performance of Blake Lively. While at times it feels far too villainous while substituting mystery for arrogance, it’s her character through and through. It’s largely a preference of her style that makes it work for viewers, but once the third act rolls in, she finds an entirely new gear that pulls it all together, turning her villainous turn into a sympathetic antihero.
It’s a far more exciting turn than Anna Kendrick is allowed to provide aside from a literal doozy of an interrogation once her character is facing near-certain death. Centering the new story around her makes for an at times boring affair as she’s the least interesting central figure, but Kendrick’s poise does help ground it all together.
And for a movie that has a dozen Spanish soap opera turns and twists, grounding the movie with some mundanity with Kendrick might be a requirement.
Chief among those telenovela moments has to be Elizabeth Perkins, a newcomer to this backstabbing revenge story, playing Lively’s estranged mother alongside her suspicious aunt Allison Janney. Perkins is a scene stealer in every single moment she’s on screen- a true feat when many of those are shared by Janney.
While it may lean heavily on plot twists and surprises to make its impact, those are precisely what make it even more fun than the first go around.
