Saturday, 3 May 2025

A Simple Favor (2018)

SPOILERS BELOW

This was just about okay. The performances are good to solid (Lively and Friend stand out) and it looks pleasant enough.

The mystery is mildly intriguing, though I was ahead of it on most stuff to the point where I wasn't sure if these things were supposed to be obvious. If you're going to have a kid in the first scene of the movie say while playing with toys "I'm not dead, I came back to life" with very clear enunciation and audio mixing, I'm going to assume that's happening at some point; if you have the victim receive a weird looking photo of themself with "got to have FAITH" written on it, I'm going to assume they have an identical twin called Faith and that's who the body was and so the 'victim' will come back to life. I'm not great at solving mysteries ahead of time and I mostly don't even try to, so if I'm this far ahead of a mystery then I assume it's too obvious. Plus, identical twins is a pretty cheap move.

The big problem is that it reveals most of this around halfway through the movie and the rest of the time is spent on drip-feeding the few remaining details, and a simplistic cat and mouse game, so it's no longer really a mystery, it's just a very tame thriller. Neither half is helped by the decision to have the protagonist be a milquetoast pushover as the lead. Kendrick is good at this, as always, but she never gets to let loose so there's nothing new for anyone familiar with her and the movie never gets out of third gear. The script gives her a dark backstory, perhaps to compensate, but outside of one momentary slip she's also a sweet little wallflower in those flashbacks, and it has zero bearing on the main story. Perhaps that time could have spent on building up the characters of Rupert Friend, Linda Cardellini or Jean Smart- as it is, they're all rather wasted here and they don't feature enough to help beef up the mystery.

Overall, it feels like it was made by someone with very mild tastes and no understanding of how mysteries work. It simply does not measure up to the likes of the Benoit Blanc mysteries or Poker Face.

Rating: milquetoast mystery.

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