A noirish mystery given a brightly-lit 21st century spin, from the capable hands behind many USA female-centric comedies, Paul Feig's A SIMPLE FAVOR hews to the tenet of “it takes a bitch to know a bitch”, pits an apparently aw- shucks, widowed single mommy vlogger Stephanie (Kendrick) against a glamourpuss career mother Emily (Lively), a fashion company's PR director. They have become instant friends just within a few weeks since their sons attend the same elementary school, one day, after asking Stephanie to babysit her son, just a simple favor, Emily mysteriously vanishes.
Not for one single second do viewers believe that Lively will disappear in the story, even when Emily's body is found later in a lake by the police, with the presence of her devastating husband Sean (a ravishingly handsome Henry Golding), in the vein of GONE GIRL, the story only just begins.
For starters, the genesis of Stephanie and Emily's fast friendship smells pretty fishy, especially reckoning Emily's galvanic refusal of being photographed, who calculatedly masks her compulsive condescension with a pretense of coolness and curiosity, mainly to fish for Stephanie's well-kept secret for assessment, which will eventually lead to the death of the latter's husband and half-brother. At the same time, a self-conscious Stephanie is believably overwhelmed to befriended by someone who seemingly is well out of her league, and is hot to trot to secure their “besties” status, totally betraying her concealed desperation for any form of human bond.
When her buried past starts catching up with her, Emily hatches a “one stone two birds” scheme, fakes her own demise in exchange for lucrative insurance payback, to save her from financial distress, because Sean is a stunted novelist and a spendthrift who can barely provide. But there is a catch here, Stephanie, whose Nancy Drew spirit incentivizes her to bird-dog Emily's dark history, who also, I forget to mention, is bedding Sean and takes the position as the new materfamilias. The final reveal is not really a game-changer, but Feig's expeditious direction holds together its by-the-number procedures until the showdown, a scale-tipping, who-outsmarts-whom game, at the expense of a hunky but frivolous Sean taking the bullets, both fake and real.
Basked in upbeat '60s French songs and spearheaded by Kendrick and Lively's high-octane frenemy battle of one-upmanship, A SIMPLE FAVOR bestirs itself as a latter-day femme fatale fantasy worth its salt and smirks, not least for tapping into the complex nexus of femininity and sororal flux.
referential entries: Feig's SPY (2015, 7.1/10); David Fincher's GONE GIRL (2014, 8.4/10).
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