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A Simple Favor: Typecasting done correctly

A Simple Plan stars Anna Kendrick, an actress I seem to be the only person on Earth unaffected by, as a single mom named Stephanie.

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Simple Favor
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Demetri Ravanos, Out
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RALEIGH, N.C. — I was downright surprised by just how much I enjoyed A Simple Favor. The first time I saw a trailer for the film I thought ,“This looks terrible!” So, I did what anyone does in this situation. I called my pal Lauren Brownlow from WRALSportsFan and said “Girlfriend, we’ve got a movie to see!”

A Simple Plan stars Anna Kendrick, an actress I seem to be the only person on Earth unaffected by, as a single mom named Stephanie. She is the alpha mother at her son’s school. There isn’t a committee she doesn’t lead. There isn’t a sign up sheet her name doesn’t dominate.

Her son befriends Nicky, whose mom, Emily, (played by Gossip Girl’s Blake Lively) is a Manhattan power player. She is a PR executive for one of the city’s top designers. She day drinks - a lot. She cusses like a sailor. She is into threesomes.

In short, she is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Stephanie in every way. Somehow though, Emily and Stephanie become friends. Stephanie begins regularly taking care of Nicky. Emily begins coxing Stephanie out of her shell.

In between games of truth or dare resulting in Stephanie’s admission that she had sex with her half-brother and very intense lessons on how to make a “real martini,” the two women seem to genuinely begin to care for each other. Then one day Stephanie receives a call from Emily asking her to pick up Nicky from school. After that, Emily just disappears and our mystery is on.

Anna Kendrick is a vlogger who befriends the glamorous Blake Lively in the female-driven thriller "A Simple Favor." (Lionsgate)

What happened to Emily? Who knows more than they are letting on? Is Stephanie a little too happy about how things have worked out for her with Emily out of her life?

The script has a lot of twists and turns…maybe even one too many, but A Simple Favor does enough to stay interesting and keep its audience guessing. While there may be some big things the movie does wrong, there are so many little things it does right.

Stephanie runs the kind of mommy-focused YouTube channel that you would expect an aspiring alpha mom to run. She gives life lessons about raising kids on your own in between recipes for gazpacho and tutorials on making soy candles at home. She is insufferable in every way imaginable.

In a way, this is what you kind of expect Anna Kendrick would be like as a single mom. I don’t know anything about her personality, but given the way she is so often cast, Kendrick has always reminded me of this cousin I have that I don’t talk to. She homeschools her kids, because no one can educate her child better than her. She doesn’t buy food from grocery stores, because grocery stores can’t be trusted. I can totally see that cousin wrapping herself up in the death of a friend for clicks and likes the way Kendrick’s character does in this movie.

Blake Lively is someone that has never moved me as an actress. She is gorgeous. That much is undeniable, but I have always felt like most of her acting roles came as a result of being gorgeous. A Simple Favor is the first role that I watch Lively in and think “she is perfect for that.”

She oozes cool when Emily is supposed to be showing off just how cool she is compared to her surroundings. She oozes sex when Emily goes into femme fatale mode. Dare I say it, Blake Lively is great in this role!

There are times that A Simple Favor gets a little too cute for its own good. The names are clever but ultimately just silly drops of nothing. Stephanie, a mom that has her tentacles around every aspect of her son’s life, has the last name Smothers. Dennis, Emily’s fashion designer boss, can be disarmed by the mere suggestion that although he is the toast of the town, he is really just a cheap poser. His last name is Nylon. It is a plot device that is at once charming in its stupidity and stupid in its desire to be charming.

The movie is directed by Paul Feig, the man behind Bridesmaids and the Ghostbusters remake, so you know there is no shortage of comedy in A Simple Favor. Sometimes though, that comedy gets to be a little too much. Bashir Salahuddin, who you may have seen on the Netflix show Glow, plays a police detective that can’t stop smiling and is constantly busting balls about Emily’s disappearance. I half expected him to say “we have fun here” after every line about murder that he giggles through.

The bottom line is that I like Paul Feig. I know a lot of people have problems with his takes on Ghostbusters and Peanuts, but his movies always leave me smiling. Going into A Simple Favor I should have had faith that this movie would be no different.

Again, you cannot deny that the ending was a mess, but the movie is entertaining. It barely takes itself seriously. Because of that it avoided the pitfalls other movies of recent years in the “a beautiful woman goes missing genre” like Gone Girl and Girl on a Train could not. Those movies were filled with so many scowls that any moment in their scripts that were kind of funny seemed unintentionally so.

A Simple Favor pokes fun at true crime lovers, mommy bloggers, socialites, and the pop culture moment we’re living through where they all can become stars by virtue of just relentlessly churning out content. It doesn’t have to be perfect as long as its barbs are, and for the most part, they cut just deep enough to entertain.

Demetri Ravanos is a member of the N.C. Film Critics Association and has reviewed movies for Raleigh and Company, Military1.com and The Alan Kabel Radio Network.

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