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.
Another Simple Favor opens with Stephanie Smothers (Kendrick) sending out a cry for help through a livestream to her fans, from the Italian hotel in which she’s been put on house arrest. She’s been framed for murder, and Emily is the reason. Flash back to a few months ago, and Stephanie is a published author and amateur true-crime detective with a few cases under her belt. Her book on Emily’s case has made her moderately famous — famous enough that when Emily stalks into her book reading to invite Stephanie to her wedding in Italy, it goes viral. Feeling pressured to sell books and satiate her fans, Stephanie agrees to be Emily’s maid of honor, though she’s positive that this is all part of Emily’s scheme to murder her as revenge for ruining her life.
When she arrives in Italy, Stephanie finds herself pulled into a complicated web of criminal conspiracies, which involve the Italian Mafia, the FBI, and Emily’s shifty aunt Linda McLinden (Allison Janney) who has resurfaced alongside Emily’s estranged mother (Elizabeth Perkins). When the wedding climaxes in a deadly barrage of bullets, Stephanie finds herself with evidence piling against her.
Another Simple Favor is structured like a whodunit, with bodies piling up throughout the wedding celebrations, and several suspects in play. But Stephanie’s attempts to play Poirot are foiled when she becomes Suspect No. 1, at which point Feig can’t help but up the stakes of the film, turning Another Simple Favor into a full-fledged international extravaganza. There’s dueling mobs, torture scenes, motorcycle chases, and literal cliffhangers. But in piling on the bombast, Feig and writers Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis seem to have forgotten that the fun of the original was in the audience being fooled into thinking they were watching a regular melodrama, before it goes whole-hog unhinged. Feig rushes us through the setup to get to the good stuff, which is all good and fun, but leaves the latter half of the film a little bogged down in twists. However, the film lights up again whenever Kendrick and Lively are on screen together, trading barbed remarks and not bullets.
Another Simple Favor is the same cocktail as the original, but with a little more ice and a few more ingredients. However, it doesn’t dampen the flavor: dry, twisted, and deliciously demented.
