Another Simple Favor Totally Ruins Something I Thought Was Really Amazing About The First Movie

SPOILER WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for Another Simple Favor. If you have not yet seen the film, proceed at your own risk! For a spoiler-free take, check out my two-star CinemaBlend review.

I love a good red herring. When it comes to great mystery fiction, I am very much the kind of audience member who actively takes in all of the presented clues and tries to deduce what is going on right alongside the protagonist. I love it when a story can throw me for a loop with a distracting detail. In recent years, one of my favorite examples of this is in director Paul Feig’s A Simple Favor.

There are many cool narrative turns in the 2018 thriller, but there is one particular seed that never actually blossoms: when Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) first confronts Emily (Blake Lively) about having a twin, the latter off-handedly mentions that she isn’t actually a twin but instead a triplet – one of her sisters having died in childbirth. It’s the kind of specific exposition that you assume is introduced as a foundation for a surprise development in the third act, but that never actually happens, and I love that it never happens. It’s a cliché that the movie nimbly avoids.

Seven years later, we now have Another Simple Favor, and all of that excellence is flushed down the toilet. It’s often said that sequels and remakes can’t ruin their predecessors because the predecessors continue to exist, but this is a rare case where that’s not true; the new movie makes it seem like the original purposefully hid a secret as a means of setting up a reveal in the follow up, and it’s a big bummer.

The issue rests in just how obvious the plot development is in the sequel. In what I maintain is perfectly logical behavior, I made the decision to rewatch A Simple Favor right before seeing Another Simple Favor, and the big consequence of that decision was that I saw the big twist coming from a mile away and had to wait what felt like an eternity for the characters to figure out what I already did.

The sequel thinks it is being sly when Emily’s mother, Margaret (Elizabeth Perkins), says during the pre-wedding reception, “I know what you did. I saw the ashes. Who burns a baby, right?” It’s supposed to come across as a non-sequitur from a gin-soaked, resentful mother, but the reality is that the movie might as well put the words “CHARITY IS ALIVE” on screen.

There are other reasons that I was disappointed with Another Simple Favor (for example, the ridiculously forced friendship between Stephanie and Emily), but this decision is particularly irksome. Ineffective mystery construction is one thing, but it adds insult to injury that the 2025 movie picks up a thread from the first movie that was better left un-pulled. Not only is it lazy writing to go for that low-hanging fruit, but it’s also notably a less effective echo of one of its predecessor’s big twists, which is one of the worst pitfalls into which a sequel can fall.

I went into Another Simple Favor with high hopes and expectations, but they dissolved like gossamer as soon as I figured out it was going with the secret triplet route. Considering that it occurred about 30 minutes into the two-hour movie, to say that I was disappointed with the sequel would be a significant understatement.