Blog Archives
Another Simple Favor (2025)
The sly 2018 original was a tart breath of fresh air, chronicling a friendship between two moms, one of means and one of lesser means, that unraveled a conspiracy of death, lies, secret twins, ransom, and murder. It was an enjoyable diversion that was elevated by snappy banter, a combustible chemistry between Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, and some dishy twists. I wasn’t expecting a sequel, but with the same director and principal cast returning, I was at least a little intrigued as to what they would cook up. Instead Another Simple Favor is a warmed-over retread of the original. This time we travel to scenic Italy where Emily (Lively) has been released from prison and is now marrying a wealthy Mafia scion and wants Stephanie (Kendrick), her old frenemy, to be her maid of honor. At its best, the sequel has glimmers of the spiky fun of its predecessor thanks to the serviceably witty banter and ongoing fun between its lead actresses. Mostly, it’s a tangled mess chasing after what made the original entertaining and adult. I can pretend I fully understood the plot with its assault of soapy revelations, character intersections, and convoluted machinations, but that would be a lie. There are times where the movie feels like an overburdened runaway “yes and…” improv game, where anything and anything is accepted and absorbed into the script. I wonder if every additional movie is just going to add more versions of a certain character. If you’re a fan of the 2018 original there might be enough here to prove fleetingly engaging, like the fabulous villas and extravagant costumes, but mostly Another Simple Favor doesn’t feel like it’s doing anyone a real favor.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare (2024)
This is my kind of Guy Ritchie, leaning into the pulp sensibilities of genre movies with style, swagger, and cheek, and The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare is his grand ode to the WWII men-on-a-mission capers. While reportedly based upon the recently divulged secret files of Winston Churchill, the heavily fictionalized account of Gus March-Phillips (Henry Cavill) assembling a team of experts to blow up Nazi plots treats the men like super heroes. For the first hour or so, the movie is rollicking, with the team mirthfully mowing down Nazis at a steady pace, chumming it up, and having a fine time. It’s only after that midpoint where some of the movie’s flaws start to drag and become more apparent. First of all, an extended mission of getting close to a Head Nazi (Til Sweiger) and abscond with some ships off the coast of Africa makes for a very labored stay but without much fekt in progression or complication. I was feeling wanderlust to get moving. Next, the entire team feels unstoppable to the point of becoming boring. They never break a sweat fighting and casually plow through their enemies, so the entertainment value of the slaughter begins to ebb when it all feels too easy for too long. You can do an entire movie of Nazi destruction from the hands of an unstoppable force, like Sisu, but the bloody appeal of that movie is its creative carnage. We needed more variation in the action and set pieces. These gents have no formidable adversary, no overwhelming odds, and no real bouts of bad luck to thwart them. Alan Ritchson (TV’s Reacher) is a hulking mountain of a man, and he has such poise and charisma to be the breakout character, and Ritchie just fumbles it. Ritchie has excelled in the past with easily imbuing striking and memorable personality and conflicts with his Cockney crime larks, and I was missing more of that peppy style and unique flavor. Don’t get me wrong, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare has great promise and entertainment value, but it unfortunately creates its own ceiling, stalling in the second half and failing to develop intriguing challenges to test its underwritten crew.
Nate’s Grade: B-
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Persuasion (2022)
Jane Austen is one of those name brand institutions, and yet the pioneering author only has six actual titles to her name (a seventh was unfinished; two were published after her death, including Persuasion). There have been five previous adaptations of Persuasion, including one from 2021, so I wasn’t rankled when the early trailers for Netflix’s Persuasion took a chance with their adaptation. There are plentiful fourth wall breaks where our protagonist, Anne (Dakota Johnson), and handheld camerawork that makes it feel more faux documentary at points, and there is more modern jokes and modern rom-com sense and sensibilities, and judging by the social media response, there are a lot of angry Austen purists who loathe these changes (could this movie be more heretical than Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?). I found the 2022 Persuasion to be perfectly pleasant and easy to watch. Johnson is tailor-made for the headstrong, intelligent, yearning lead of an Austen movie, and with her directly speaking to the camera, I felt a kinship with her, and this stylistic choice also allowed the screenwriters to sneak in more of that flowery Austen prose. Some of the jokes are a little clunky but I laughed or smiled at most of the comedic elements, especially Richard E. Grant as Anne’s foppish and status-obsessed father. I enjoyed Henry Golding (Crazy Rich Asians) as the caddish Mr. Elliot, a man born with a Cheshire grin. I enjoyed plenty of this movie, including its racial diversity, and the staples of these Regency romances like the exquisite production design, costumes, and English countryside. I can understand some grumbling that this isn’t “their Persuasion,” but not every movie is for every person, and there’s nothing about the 2022 movie that retroactively cancels out other adaptations that fans would prefer. For 100 minutes, it felt like Austen had been re-framed as a rom-com blueprint, and Persuasion had renewed charm for me.
Nate’s Grade: B
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The Gentlemen (2020)
I’ve been hoping, wishing, praying for Guy Ritchie to return back to his screwball Cockney crime pictures of his splashy beginning, but the further and further I get from 2001’s Snatch, the more I think it’s a luxuriously madcap exception. The Gentlemen is a closer return to form than 2008’s RocknRolla, but it’s still a long way off from early Ritchie. The recognizable elements are there, from the convoluted story with twists and turns, the non-linear storytelling lapping and overlapping itself, the comical brushes with sudden violence, the colorful array of criminal characters, and a sense of style that seems all over the place. We follow Matthew McConaughey as a marijuana titan looking to get out of the business, though there are threats old, new, and “just business” that are trying to take his empire from him before his exit. The biggest problem with The Gentlemen is how clever it feels like it needs to be and how few characters there are to find interesting. Snatch, by contrast, forever contrast, was practically a Dick Tracy rogues gallery of all its memorable and unpredictable characters. These feel pretty rote, even our heroes, and the minority characters get even shorter shrift. The plot is also more complicated than it needs to be with an extended meta-textual layer of a lecherous Hugh Grant tabloid journalist pitching the story like it was a movie (irony: it is a movie!). It took maybe 45 minutes before I felt like the story was finally picking up momentum and stakes, and by the end, it felt like Ritchie was just extending his story with another twist and wrap-up, and then another twist and wrap-up, like the outer edges of the movie cannot be contained and somehow it’s still even going. It’s like Ritchie doesn’t know when to walk away from his own party. Because of these things the pacing is wonky and there are more than a few tedious stretches. Colin Farrell has some amusing moments but should have been the main character as a boxing trainer who takes a shine to try and reform local hoodlums. McConaughey’s character is too boring and always wins too easily, which makes him more boring. The Gentlemen is a C-level rendition of Ritchie’s best material, and Snatch only shines even brighter with each new miss.
Nate’s Grade: C+
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