L'Ombre d'Emily 2

Five years ago my wife and I watched 'A Simple Favor' and found it reasonably interesting and entertaining. So we settled in after dinner and wine to watch this sequel, streaming on Prime.

Had my wife not been watching also, I would have turned it off after the first 10 or 15 minutes. The main characters use the worst cursing language you can imagine, not to add to the story or the characters but just to use foul language. That was disappointing. But we stuck with it.

Blake Lively is back as Emily and Anna Kendrick is back as Vlogger Stephanie. This time they are going to the Isle of Capri for Emily's wedding. She sort of forces Stephanie to go along.

The first movie involves Emily using her identical twin in an illegal scheme to get money. In this movie we find out there actually were triplets, and now the third is entering the fray.

The overall story here is not that good, much of the dialog is misplaced, the situations mostly implausible.

Not a very good movie at all.

This is the worst sequel ever. They took the same characters in a stupid plot. They fail to even exploit the viewer's curiosity in seeing the protagonists after such a long time, because they all turn out to be caricatures of themselves. Everything seems forced, the dialogues are awful, and to get a smile he stuffed everything with gratuitous swear words. Seriously: I don't pay attention to swear words, but here there's one normal word for every ten swear words. Not even halfway through the film I was already wondering if it was time to turn it off. A silly parody of the first film. I tried to get involved in the crime, but it seems like a bad B-movie.

I enjoyed the first movie. The characters had some realism to them and were somewhat likeable. These characters are cardboard cutouts, profoundly selfish and unlikeable, unbelievable and written as if some not ready for prime time 19 year who was trying to be cool wrote this. Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, do you really need the money this bad? I would have read the script and said I am not doing this film - not unless the script is shredded and rewritten. You can kiss a third installment goodbye after this mess. If you can go into this with no expectations and see it as a forgettable who done it, then maybe it is worth watching while folding socks or something.

I loved the first movie and I didn't exactly have high expectations but, with a star-studded cast, I did expect more.

Tbh it was pretty bad in my opinion - extremely far-fetched, cheesy, and underwhelming. I fell asleep halfway through it because I found it difficult to pay attention and when I finished it later, it definitely got worse instead of better.

I won't post spoilers but I was super disappointed with the plot twists and the added backstory. The writers could have made this movie SO much better but, nope. Unfortunately it felt like I was watching a low budget, cheesy lifetime movie.

Are we supposed to remember the not very memorable movie from 2018 that this is a sequel to? Well according to IMDb I actually did watch that one, but no, sorry, I am drawing a complete blank.

Meanwhile this movie is just a jumble of ideas and none of them are very good. Lots of twists and turns that are supposed to dazzle us but there are no real stakes and there never is real tension to get the viewer invested. The parts that are supposed to be funny work here and there but even then... Great locations though.

I think Paul Feig peaked with Bridesmaids and that is almost 15 years ago. Maybe it is me that is getting too old for this.