'A Simple Favor' and the joys of trashy movies

Director Paul Feig's comic thriller A Simple Favor feels like a throwback movie, whether it's intended to be or not. It belongs in the same family as crowd-pleasing potboilers like Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, although I think it's not quite in their class.

It's a ridiculous movie, kind of a mess in more ways than one, and yet I still thought it was a fun watch, if nothing else because it was at least trying to be an old school twisty genre film. Of course, there can be a scenario where there are two many twists -- and A Simple Favor certainly suffers from that. It's tone shifts so abruptly from comedy to melodrama, and not in an assured Lynchian way.

And yet, I wish there were more movies like it, because it's a movie wholly concerned with hooking you in with it story and style (and some gratuitous bits too).

Anna Kendrick is a wonder in it -- and her character probably deserved a more sophisticated vehicle -- I kind of wished the film had embraced a bleaker scenario, where her character was the 'villain' of the piece, but as the trailer gave away and the first five minutes of this movie cement -- is the fact Blake Lively is the big baddie in it.

Which may be one of the movies most glaring flaws. As striking as she is, I simply didn't buy Lively as a Machiavellian manipulator of men and women (although she does have one very effectively scene where she SPOILER ALERT plays off, let's just say an alternative version of herself).

However, for the most part she feels like a kid playing dress up and Feig complies by putting her in distractingly fantastical outfits and heavy makeup from scene to scene. Kendrick is essentially playing the ultimate version of her nerdy, theater girl persona, but she manages to insert some darkness and a little madness into that box which is intriguing.

I only wished that the male component of their trio -- the handsome but bland Crazy Rich Asians actor Henry Golding -- had any personality to speak of let alone jockey over. Movies like these live or die by the performances in them and when they are lacking the film can never fully recover from it.

Basically this film doesn't know what kind of movie it wants to be. Some of the funny bits, while charming, feel so tonally jarring that they only serve to underscore some of the jaw-dropping absurdity of the more serious plot turns. This is a film where is a 'best' friendship is forged over a couple of afternoons and widowed husband SPOILER ALERT starts having an affair with his wife's best friend the day of his wife's funeral.

And, with all this being said, I was never bored -- this movie moves -- it looks great (although why Feig chose to make Lively's character such an over the top fashionista I'll never know, especially since her scheming antagonist would seemingly want to move through the world as discreetly as possible.

I kept thinking, in a good way, they really don't make movie like this anymore. Movies where you can really hook your friends by telling them what its about: Socially awkward woman befriends a 'cool mom' at her kids school, she starts watching both of their kids as a favor after school, but then suddenly the cool mom disappears for four days. Oh, and the socially awkward mom is pretty much obsessed with the woman and has a very weird fucked up past that I won't spoil here.

So far so good right? But unfortunately A Simple Favor isn't simple it becomes needlessly complicated, and Lively in particular goes increasingly smug as she begins to unfurl her supposedly master plan and it all becomes rather silly.

But I hope Feig and Hollywood keep dipping a toe into the trashy thriller waters because quite often the results can be a ton of fun.