So deliciously dumb that it’s fun!

A still from Another Simple Favor, starring Anna Kendrick (left) and Blake Lively

Movies are best done like blind dates. You've no clue what's on offer. The flip side is, after seeing it, you could wish you were blind yourself! The good part is, you may fall for something, so totally not your scene.

Which was my scene, sitting through Paul Fieg's Anna Kendrick, Blake Lively starrer, Another Simple Favor (that drops on Amazon Prime Video, May 1).

The murder-mystery comedy is a sequel of A Simple Favor (2018), based on Darcey Bell's novel of the same name, alright.

But I entered the preview theatre, knowing nothing about it. Besides, an Italian song, sampled from its finely cut trailer. The song in the film is shot, like mainstream Bollywood - lusciously across the picturesque, blue expanse of Tyrrhenian Sea in Capri, Italy.

Then again, why do I, or most Indians in fact, recognise this killer Italian track, L'Italiano by Toto Cutugno?

Well, it's the song that got lifted as ‘Nasha yeh pyar ka nasha hai' in the Aamir Khan, Manisha Koirala starrer, Mann (1999), that itself was inspired by the Hollywood classic, An Affair to Remember (1957).

This is as mildly embarrassing as the other Aamir-Manisha, unofficial remake of Kramer vs Kramer (1990), Akele Hum Akele Tum (1995), where the title track was goddammed ripped off from The Godfather theme!

The Godfather gets referenced in Another Simple Favor. Because the female lead, Emily (Blake Lively), is set to marry a "budget Mafiosi" in Italy.

And as her maid of honour Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) puts it, "If you've seen The Godfather, [you know] this didn't work out too well for Diane Keaton!"

Emily, Stephanie (bride, maid of honour) are meant to be best friends. Or they were, because their kids go to the same school. But they're really not. The latter sent the former to jail, in this film's prequel, over a murder charge, and even wrote a book about it.

Emily's emerged from prison since, dragging Stephanie to her wedding party in Capri - promising some shit will go down, for sure!

That said, what kinda murder mystery is centred on two chiller white moms, from suburban America, with a Malaysian-descent Henry Golding hanging in the periphery as the husband? Golding became the global Shah Rukh Khan-like chick magnet, post Crazy Rich Asians (2018). He starred in A Simple Favor around the same time.

It takes a totally unabashed romantic film to get you that inexplicable female following, sometimes lasting forever. The Notebook did that for Ryan Gosling; DDLJ did it for SRK.

As with Crazy Rich Asians for Golding. Only that he's pretty much a ‘sidey' in Another Simple Favor that, like its prequel, is an altogether ditsy comedy - about two women friends, making girlie talk over martini, as if in Sex and the City - where deaths seem like plot deviations.

To be fair, I went over for Another Simple Favor, wholly blind, for the Gossip Girl alum, Blake Lively. Her last outing, Justin Baldoni's It Ends with Us (2024), was a rare, deeply intense drama about domestic violence, that rightly cracked it at the box-office ($325 million, on a $25 million budget).

This, at a time, when general perception is the audiences only watch blast-fests and spectacles in cinemas.

It Ends with Us, of course, didn't end well for Lively, married to superstar Ryan Reynolds. What with her filing a sexual harassment case against her co-star and director Baldoni. Who, in turn, filed a counter-suit claiming damages for defamation. It's still playing out in the press.

The complicated Lively-Baldoni case remains an important one for how complex the idea of privilege can be; obvious notions of feminism apart.

I'm sure you've been following it on the social media since it blew up; taking sides, alongside, as well. The case goes to trial in 2026.

I'd rather wait for a deep-dive documentary - like Emma Cooper's Depp v Heard (Netflix), similarly on the Johnny Depp, Amber Heard marital madness - to get a real lowdown on the Lively-Baldoni brouhaha.

As it is, there's rumours floating around on how Lively and her Another Simple Favor co-star Anna Kendrick had issues on sets (in the backdrop of Lively's falling-out with her best friend, Taylor Swift, who sided with Baloni on the defamation case).

Surely, all of this subconsciously adds to the lightweight comedy of murders in Another Simple Favor, where Lively plays a devious nut!

It's hard not to be taken in by her onscreen poise/charm, though. Which contrasts so naturally with Kendrick's easy-going, excitable silver tongue; she plays an online "vlogger", who are probably called influencers now.

Surely their film's first part would've done well for the sequel to go off from small-town Connecticut into widescreen islandic Italy.

What remains are random movie references from Diabolique (1996) to Kate Winslet's underwater breathing exercise for Avatar: The Way of Water, or if Kate actually killed Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Titanic!

I watched the prequel, after the sequel - drowning in the guilty pleasure of screenwriters fishing out a triple role, after a double role!

It's been a while since we found and enjoyed such delicious dumbness in films that were often in Hindi. Now it's Hollywood; we turn to thee. Love it, and so be it!

Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.