In 2018’s A Simple Favor, Blake Lively’s glamorous housewife Emily Nelson has a very particular way of making a martini: swirl a little vermouth around in a frozen glass, toss it, add some frozen gin, cut a generous twist, and squeeze a misting of lemon on top. And absolutely no f*cking ice. It’s a scene that perfectly embodies the weird, surprising success of Paul Feig’s blackly comic send-up of the true-crime movie — part soap opera, part comedy, part neo-gothic thriller, A Simple Favor was a deliciously twisted cult film in the making. It’s a wild cocktail of tones that shouldn’t work, and yet, thanks to Anna Kendrick’s self-effacing turn and Lively’s vampy villainess, it totally does.
With Feig’s follow-up, Another Simple Favor, he changes up the ingredients of the cocktail a little. Lively’s Emily Nelson, now out of prison and planning a fittingly glamorous wedding to Italian businessman Dante Versano (Michele Morrone), now makes martinis a little differently. She’s OK with the shortcut of using ice — she has no time to wait for her glasses and gin to freeze. Another Simple Favor, like Emily’s new way of making martinis, is quite similar: it remixes the elements of the original to deliver us yet another twisty, soapy delight. But it does use a few shortcuts along the way, resulting in a movie that feels like it’s lost a little of the shocking novelty of the first. But it makes do by throwing in as many twists and turns as it possibly can.
