It has been a long time since I saw the first movie – A Simple Favor; I don’t recall the story except that Blake Lively’s character asks Anna Kendrick’s character for help. If you are like me, please do yourselves a favor and watch that again. The cast, while made up of both new and old characters, it is hard to follow the character dynamics.

Stephanie Smothers (Anna Kendrick) opens the movie indicating that she is under house arrest in beautiful Capri. The movie then goes into flashback to get the audience up to speed on what happened. Stephanie’s novel “The Faceless Blonde” is still waiting to break into the bestseller list. On a book reading/signing event, Emily/Hope (Blake Lively) shows up saying she has now been released due to an issue with the evidence. She invites Stephanie to her upcoming wedding with Dante Versano adopting a half-threatening (with a lawsuit for using Emily’s story without permission) and a half-enticing (more book sales if she can vlog the story) angle.

Stephanie goes along and gets to meet the groom’s family and other guests including Emily’s ex-husband Sean (Henry Golding) and their son. To catch the audience up to the weird triangle, Sean sleeping with Stephanie is brought up. Dante’s mother is hostile to Emily as she believes the latter to be after the family’s money. Sean gets upset at the lunch the day before the wedding and storms off only to be killed by an unknown person. The police rule it out as an accident, partly due to the Versano’s being rich and powerful and also the local mafia. I probably should have led with the mafia bit. The wedding goes as planned and Dante is killed later in the evening. Dante’s mother, Portia, suspects Emily, but she is in the party in the presence of everyone. Stephanie sees the murder, but no one else corroborates what she sees and becomes suspect Numero Uno.

We are now back to the start of the story where Stephanie is under house arrest and is visited by Emily. Emily acts oddly and makes it appear that Stephanie slashed her leading to additional impositions on the conditions of the house arrest like her phone getting confiscated. Stephanie slowly realizes that it was not Emily, but the third triplet – Charity who was thought to be dead at childbirth. Stephanie escapes, but is shortly caught by the police. Can our protagonist defy the odds with the police, the mafia mom (Portia), Charity and where is Emily? This forms the rest of the story and as expected, everyone gets to go home smiling.

Now, before you go and watch A Simple Favor and then Another Simple Favor to find out the ending, let me save you a few hours. It is just not worth it. The plot is weak and introducing the presumed dead triplet – Charity, was just a lazy way to introduce mystery and intrigue into the movie. The way characters behaved made no sense. For e.g., Sean and Stephanie seemed to be on good terms at the end of the first movie, but are suddenly distant and seem to have no communication with each other. The shower scene with Sean was just plain yucky, there are a dozen different ways to have Sean killed to have the actor being killed in this way was twisted.

I had hopes that the FBI agent, Irene Walker, was not who she claimed to be, especially since the phone call where Stephanie reaches out to her FBI friend and he begins to describe her, the phone is cut by Stephanie. For her to be killed for no good reason was another example of the where it seemed like the story was written as the movie was shot. I could go all the way to the beginning of the movie and wonder why Emily invited Stephanie in the first place. She has no motive and it is not explained ever. Characters flit in and out of scenes without anyone being given serious character development. The reveal about why Dante chose Emily is also half-baked and isn’t a strong enough motive for him to put a team of lawyers to get Emily out of jail. This role could have been played by anyone else who was co-operative. Charity’s obsession with Emily/Hope is strange as well. On the one hand she resents Hope for killing Faith, but wants Hope all for herself and has a romantic interest with her sister?

The movie calls itself a Comedy-Mystery, but there is not a single joke in the movie. Inspite of being panned by many, Adam Sandler & Jennifer Aniston’s Murder Mystery is a much better example of the Comedy-Mystery genre than either of the Favor movies. Do yourself a favor and save the time you will spend watching the movie plus the 30 minutes following it wondering what happened, by avoiding this one.