Meewella | Critic

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Tag: Blake Lively

QuickView: A Simple Favour (2018)

A Simple Favour poster

“Oh, you don’t want to be friends with me, trust me.”

Emily

Lately Paul Feig has carved out a mainstream niche in typically light female-fronted films, varying from the excellent Bridesmaids to the disappointing Ghostbusters reboot. A Simple Favour takes a darker turn from the outset when an overachieving single mother searches for answers after her new best friend goes missing, but it never fully commits tonally in the way of Gone Girl. Anna Kendrick may seem miscast as a sleuth but her charming naïvité, narrating her discoveries through a vlog for mothers, is intentional. Blake Lively makes it believable that the troubled and often distanced Emily would draw people in despite her abrasiveness (she certainly won me over not just through her love of Martinis but by specifically referencing Dukes Bar and its particularly potent recipe for the cocktail). This all makes for an excellent first half — unfortunately the script then unravels with a need not just to offer revelations but repeatedly to retcon characters’ pasts. The resulting conclusion is cheapened almost to the point of parody.

6/10

QuickView: The Shallows (2016)

“I just wanted to let you know I made it here. Mom was right, it took forever to find, but it’s perfect.”

Nancy

The Shallows is a slight, but surprisingly effective, thriller right until its inability to find a satisfying conclusion. The setup is straightforward: a young woman becomes trapped by a shark whilst surfing off a remote beach in Mexico. Blake Lively is an unlikely choice for such an individually focused survival film but she offers a strong performance with believable peril and pain, whilst grappling with the emotional issues that drew her out to honour her mother’s memory. It is a shame, then, that the film’s final minutes leave the audience incredulous rather than impressed.

6/10

"A film is a petrified fountain of thought."

(CC) BY-NC 2003-2023 Priyan Meewella

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