The supporting characters in Another Simple Favor, the psycho-drama comedy sequel that’s streaming now on Prime Video, don’t know what to do with themselves in the presence of Blake Lively. Dressed in a parade of rhinestone-studded, overly accessorised ensembles (one look involves dungarees, multiple earrings and a bowler hat), Lively’s character Emily Nelson – a schemer, murderess and secret triplet who’s offed at least one of her sisters – draws gasps and mild panic every time she enters a room.
Lively’s work, from the soaring melodrama The Age of Adaline to last year’s cursed weepie It Ends with Us, tends to be maximalist like this. Everything goes big: the hair, the costumes, the ripple effect of her mere presence in a movie. It was Emily’s sudden disappearance in 2018’s A Simple Favor that transformed Anna Kendrick’s anxious mommy blogger into a citizen detective, and it’s Emily’s shock return – and the mystery dead body that turns up soon after – that kickstart its sequel. But even for a star of her magnitude, Lively feels too big for Another Simple Favor. Arriving amid the messy legal battle between Lively and Justin Baldoni, the director and leading man of It Ends with Us, the new sequel gets sucked into the vortex of completely unrelated off-camera drama. You leave it pondering if every future Blake Lively role will follow suit.
