A Simple Favour

Imagine somebody wrote a fairly lackadaisical beach novel full of murder, mystery, red herrings, improbable plot twists and purple prose. Imagine that said novel got optioned and ended up in the hands of a director known chiefly for ham-fisted Melissa McCarthy vehicles. Imagine that said director decided the best way to adapt said novel was via a cross-pollination of Hitchcockian tropes and trés trés chic 1960s Euro-cinema surface gloss – and, as if that wasn’t glossy enough, said director dipped the whole thing into the day-glo ‘Stepford Wives’ paintbox until the fumes almost overcame it.

Sounds like a recipe for what you’d get if disaster and chaos hatefucked and had a kid they gave up for adoption because it made Damien look like the baby Jesus, right?

Sounds like the filmic equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, a dentist’s drill and the collected works of Justin Bieber mixed together and projected through a Hadron collider, right?

Because that’s sure what it sounded like to me.

So I went along and took in a screening and –

Now, jes’ hold up, Mr Fancy Pants Movie Critic. Why’n the name of Elvis’s bath salts would you go along and see a movie that you’d already made up your mind was a piece of ess aitch one tee?

Anna Kendrick. Any more questions, or can I continue with this review.

Uh, sure thing. Meant no disrespect, son.

None taken. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. Owing to the fact that Anna Kendrick – who I’m slightly in love with based on her Twitter feed alone – was in it, I went along and took in a screening. Obvs, it didn’t hurt that Blake Lively was also in it. Granted, there was a time when Blake Lively’s presence in a movie would have elicited a “ho hum” from me at best, after which I’d have interrogated my local multiplex’s website for something starring Amy Adams or Emily Blunt instead, but that was before I saw ‘The Shallows’. Post-‘The Shallows’, I accepted the Gospel According to Blake Lively and lo I have repented of my erstwhile transgressions.

Uh, Mr Fancy Pants Movie Critic, you know that your wife reads this blog, right? You might wanna, y’know, critique the movie. Either that or, I dunno, maybe the doghouse is cosy enough for ya.

Um. Yeah. Good call, friend. Right. So. ‘A Simple Favour’, directed by Paul Feig, kicks off with a slick, half-cool-half-camp opening credits sequence that feels like you should be watching something starring Marcello Mastroianni and Elke Sommer; what it gives onto, instead, is a simpering to-camera piece by Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick), the kind of perpetually perky helpful-hints-and-tips mommy blogger (oh, sorry, vlogger) that you’d normally run a mile to avoid. Indeed, most of her fellow single-or-otherwise moms in the relatively privileged surburban enclave she can just afford to live in thanks to her dead husband’s life insurance payoff subscribe to her vlog solely to mock her.

Only Stephanie’s vlog is going through the roof in terms of subscribers and it’s not because of her cookie recipes or handy life hacks. Nope, it’s because her bite-sized updates on the disappearance of BFF Emily (Lively) are capturing the public’s imagination. Emily is everything Stephanie’s always wanted to be – stylish, daring, enigmatic and possessed of a husband who isn’t six feet under – and it doesn’t really matter if they’ve only known each other a few weeks or that Emily basically treats Stephanie like an unpaid servant as well as manipulating her as elegantly as, say, Alfred Brendel playing a Schubert piano sonata; Stephanie finally has a friend and her social horizons have expanded beyond the claustrophic, mutually needy, not-far-off-‘The-Babadook’ relationship she has with her son.

But as good as it is having a stylish and sexy friend, it’s so much better having a stylish, sexy missing friend. It means Stephanie gets to be the centre of attention for once. Gets to bone Emily’s grief-stricken husband (Henry Golding). Gets to usurp her place in her stylish, sexy, architecture-porn multi-bedroom house. And it’s all fun and (bedroom) games until she takes her wannabe Nancy Drew role a bit too seriously and starts finding things out about Emily that …

Well, we’d be lurching into spoiler territory if we went any further down that route and ‘A Simple Favour’ is a film best approached with no preconceptions or foreknowledge. That way, the jaw-droppingly cynical and politically incorrect humour will wallop you all the more concussively; the acidic takedown of genre tropes will hit all the harder; the performances will zing all the zingier (all addition to the above mentioned triumvirate, Rupert Friend as bitchy fashion designer, Jean Smart as an alcoholic matriarch and – especially – Linda Cardinelli as an edgy artist all deliver knockout turns); and the film’s sheer unadulterated joy in wallowing in the most venal of (in)human traits will wash over you all the more blissfully. If mean-spiritedness were a bath ballistic, Lush would market it under licence to this movie.

‘A Simple Favour’ sets up the traditions and expectations of a well-worn genre and ruthlessly rips the piss. It glories in shifting audience sympathies between different characters only to reveal all of them as shitbags of the highest order. It has no moral compass and invites you to find that particular fact utterly hilarious. It’s a hymn to its leading ladies and a black valentine to mainstream sensibilities. It’s nasty and sassy; good unclean fun. It has its cake, eats it, cock-teases the waiter and then fucks off without paying the bill.