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‘Another Simple Favor’ Does the Martinis Dirty
Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick reunite in Italy | Lorenzo Sisti/Amazon MGM Studios In the sequel to “A Simple Favor,” Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick’s campy 2018 thriller, the cocktails don’t live up to the characters’ exacting standards A Simple Favor, the 2018 film starring Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick, is a movie about drinking good martinis. Early in, Lively, as the mysterious Connecticut mom Emily Wilson, demonstrates her process for making a proper martini. The key, she says, strutting from the freezer of her fancy home while wearing a crisply tailored suit and white bow tie, is “frozen gin, and a frozen glass.” She plunks down a chilly bottle of Aviation Gin (owned in real life by Lively’s husband, the actor Ryan Reynolds) in front of Anna Kendrick, playing mousey mom-vlogger Stephanie Smothers, who apparently knows nothing about martinis. This martini, Emily explains with an air of superiority, is inspired by the time-honored version at Dukes in London. Emily swirls the frosty v-shaped glass to leave only a trace of vermouth, then finishes the drink with a twist. Despite this insistence that a martini must be cold, she offers one more word of advice: “Don’t add fucking ice, ever.” The specificity with which Emily wants her martini, and how she haughtily uses it as a teaching moment to Stephanie, symbolizes her status: Emily is the one with exacting standards and an enviable lifestyle; Stephanie is the mom nobody wants to be friends with. The martini becomes the movie’s most defining symbol (and spoiler alert for a seven-year-old movie): After Stephanie, once the frumpy wannabe, essentially engineers Emily’s downfall, the two women clandestinely meet at a cemetery. Stephanie, cool and polished, pours the martinis, spritzing them with lemon as once Emily instructed, proving that she’s now a formidable match for Emily as opposed to a sad sidekick. Naturally, the martinis continue into Another Simple Favor, the sequel now available on Prime Video. In it, Emily, who has recently been released from prison, invites Stephanie to be the maid of honor at her elaborate wedding in Capri, under the threat of a lawsuit if she doesn’t come. The sequel — which, like its predecessor, largely exists to show off Lively’s penchant for pantsuits and other unhinged fashion choices — ups the ante on A Simple Favor’s campiness. The martinis start on the private jet to Italy, when Emily pours Stephanie a martini while telling her all about her mysterious, rich Italian fiancé. They appear later, in a scene-setting moment as two guests receive them while sitting in the lobby of the group’s Capri hotel. Later, when Emily and Stephanie meet at the pool for Emily’s bachelorette party, Emily pours more martinis. Here’s where my simple gripe with Another Simple Favor comes in: The martinis, despite Emily’s previously stated preferences, all look too damn warm. In the plane scene, Emily says to Stephanie that “You have the duration of this flight to chill the fuck out.” What about chilling that martini? There is no frost to be seen, just Emily’s warm hands clutching her glass by the bowl and not the stem. This is a luxe private jet with a gold-embossed crystal decanter of booze at the bar — are we to believe that there is not also a freezer? It looks like a glass of water, which, to be fair, it probably is, in reality. But if we have technology that can de-age Harrison Ford to a passable if uncanny degree, we certainly have technology to make a martini frosty after the fact. At the pool, these glasses, like the ones on the plane, are similarly un-frosty, but at least we can believe that the drinks themselves end up somewhat cold, because post-prison Emily has changed slightly and shakes her martinis with ice now. (More than a statement about either character’s personal growth, this scene seems to largely exist to offer more product placement — this time for director Paul Feig’s gin brand Artingstall’s, launched in 2022.) By the time they’re in the pool, the martinis look a little chilly, I’ll give the movie that. But in A Simple Favor, martinis are the single most important visual symbol: There’s even a martini glass in the movie’s poster art. In Another Simple Favor, the martini goes from exacting and symbolic to, well, mostly an aesthetic choice: marketing bait for all the filthy-martini girlies with TikTok-fueled dreams of Italy. This might also explain why, at a recent, influencer-filled promotional event in New York City, Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick demonstrated ravioli-making, Henry Golding pizza-making, and Feig martini-making. The drinks on display, however, were decidedly non-Emily-approved. They were limoncello martinis, of all things. They were made not with Aviation nor Artingstall’s but with Tito’s vodka. The glasses, it might not surprise you, were not frosty at all.
In the sequel to “A Simple Favor,” Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick’s campy 2018 thriller, the cocktails don’t live up to the characters’ exacting standards
A Simple Favor, the 2018 film starring Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick, is a movie about drinking good martinis. Early in, Lively, as the mysterious Connecticut mom Emily Wilson, demonstrates her process for making a proper martini. The key, she says, strutting from the freezer of her fancy home while wearing a crisply tailored suit and white bow tie, is “frozen gin, and a frozen glass.” She plunks down a chilly bottle of Aviation Gin (owned in real life by Lively’s husband, the actor Ryan Reynolds) in front of Anna Kendrick, playing mousey mom-vlogger Stephanie Smothers, who apparently knows nothing about martinis.
This martini, Emily explains with an air of superiority, is inspired by the time-honored version at Dukes in London. Emily swirls the frosty v-shaped glass to leave only a trace of vermouth, then finishes the drink with a twist. Despite this insistence that a martini must be cold, she offers one more word of advice: “Don’t add fucking ice, ever.” The specificity with which Emily wants her martini, and how she haughtily uses it as a teaching moment to Stephanie, symbolizes her status: Emily is the one with exacting standards and an enviable lifestyle; Stephanie is the mom nobody wants to be friends with.
The martini becomes the movie’s most defining symbol (and spoiler alert for a seven-year-old movie): After Stephanie, once the frumpy wannabe, essentially engineers Emily’s downfall, the two women clandestinely meet at a cemetery. Stephanie, cool and polished, pours the martinis, spritzing them with lemon as once Emily instructed, proving that she’s now a formidable match for Emily as opposed to a sad sidekick.
Naturally, the martinis continue into Another Simple Favor, the sequel now available on Prime Video. In it, Emily, who has recently been released from prison, invites Stephanie to be the maid of honor at her elaborate wedding in Capri, under the threat of a lawsuit if she doesn’t come. The sequel — which, like its predecessor, largely exists to show off Lively’s penchant for pantsuits and other unhinged fashion choices — ups the ante on A Simple Favor’s campiness. The martinis start on the private jet to Italy, when Emily pours Stephanie a martini while telling her all about her mysterious, rich Italian fiancé. They appear later, in a scene-setting moment as two guests receive them while sitting in the lobby of the group’s Capri hotel. Later, when Emily and Stephanie meet at the pool for Emily’s bachelorette party, Emily pours more martinis.
Here’s where my simple gripe with Another Simple Favor comes in: The martinis, despite Emily’s previously stated preferences, all look too damn warm.
In the plane scene, Emily says to Stephanie that “You have the duration of this flight to chill the fuck out.” What about chilling that martini? There is no frost to be seen, just Emily’s warm hands clutching her glass by the bowl and not the stem. This is a luxe private jet with a gold-embossed crystal decanter of booze at the bar — are we to believe that there is not also a freezer? It looks like a glass of water, which, to be fair, it probably is, in reality. But if we have technology that can de-age Harrison Ford to a passable if uncanny degree, we certainly have technology to make a martini frosty after the fact.
At the pool, these glasses, like the ones on the plane, are similarly un-frosty, but at least we can believe that the drinks themselves end up somewhat cold, because post-prison Emily has changed slightly and shakes her martinis with ice now. (More than a statement about either character’s personal growth, this scene seems to largely exist to offer more product placement — this time for director Paul Feig’s gin brand Artingstall’s, launched in 2022.) By the time they’re in the pool, the martinis look a little chilly, I’ll give the movie that.
But in A Simple Favor, martinis are the single most important visual symbol: There’s even a martini glass in the movie’s poster art. In Another Simple Favor, the martini goes from exacting and symbolic to, well, mostly an aesthetic choice: marketing bait for all the filthy-martini girlies with TikTok-fueled dreams of Italy. This might also explain why, at a recent, influencer-filled promotional event in New York City, Blake Lively and Anna Kendrick demonstrated ravioli-making, Henry Golding pizza-making, and Feig martini-making.
The drinks on display, however, were decidedly non-Emily-approved. They were limoncello martinis, of all things. They were made not with Aviation nor Artingstall’s but with Tito’s vodka. The glasses, it might not surprise you, were not frosty at all.
