When watching last year’s “Drive-Away Dolls,” I had the thought that, if I didn’t know this was a movie directed by one of the Coen brothers, I would think this would be from someone trying very hard to make a Coen brothers-esque film.
The same can be said for Ethan Coen‘s follow-up to that film, “Honey Don’t!” — another lesbian caper with diminishing returns also starring Margaret Qualley. Like “Drive-Away Dolls,” Coen wrote the screenplay along with his wife Tricia Cooke. Also, like “Drive-Away Dolls,” it’s a slight work that is too enamored with its own quirkiness to amount to much of anything at all.
Whereas “Drive-Away Dolls” casts Qualley as a chaotic Southern broad, here, Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, a put-together private investigator in Bakersfield, California. Honey is a tough-talking gal who shows up to the scene of a brutal car accident in red pumps, and brushes off come-ons from a dorky cop played by Charlie Day by announcing she likes girls. (While not much about this film is fantastic, Honey’s wardrobe is to costume designer Peggy Schnitzer’s credit.)
Honey is drawn into a conspiracy of sorts when a woman who reached out to her for help ends up dead at the bottom of a cliff. Although Honey never officially started working for the victim, she’s curious enough to start digging. This leads her to sniff around a local church run by a lascivious Chris Evans as Reverend Drew, a holy man who deals drugs on the side and likes to have sex with his congregants.
Meanwhile, Honey strikes up an affair with an unassumingly seductive cop who goes by MG (Aubrey Plaza), all the while Honey’s niece (Talia Ryder) gets into some trouble with a bad boyfriend and Honey’s sister (Kristen Connolly) is too busy with too many children to deal with that.
This is all to say there’s a lot going on in the movie’s very short running time, and if you’re hoping the threads all coalesce, well, they don’t. Instead, “Honey Don’t!” feels like a mishmash of disparate parts that Coen and Cooke didn’t know how to fit together. The end result is an exhausting disappointment, and a waste of the assembled talent.
Whereas “Drive-Away Dolls” was psychedelically silly — allowing it to get away with more of its slipshod plotting — “Honey Don’t!” aims for a spin on noir but has zero interest in actually developing a compelling mystery. It’s more interested in how it can reboot the aesthetics of the genre. Though it’s set in the present day — with cell phones to boot — there’s a retro sheen that hangs over the affair. Honey wears stockings with seams and uses a rolodex even though her assistant (Gabby Beans) offers to digitize her operation.
Qualley sells the part well, affecting a weary swagger, and yet we’re never really convinced that she’s all that good at her job. She’s certainly better than the police, who are a bunch of bumbling fools, but she also never really gets to the bottom of any of the dark goings-on in her town.
In fact, Evans’ plotline as the corrupt Reverend Drew essentially runs parallel to Qualley’s and the lack of intersection is a curious oversight. Evans is certainly relishing the chance to play a big-headed jerk and is up for some gonzo sex scenes, but by the time his character leaves the narrative you’re not sure what the point of him being there was. Even more confusing: His drug operation is overseen by a French syndicate, who has sent an alluring emissary played by Lera Abova, who wears leopard print and rides around on a scooter. Again, she looks cool, but to what end?
I want to say that Coen and Cooke have something on their minds about the state of America these days, but the insight doesn’t really go beyond the most obvious condemnation of religious greed and right wing assholes. At one point, for example, Honey destroys a bad guy’s shotgun and then slaps a bumper sticker that reads “I Have a Vagina and I Vote” over his MAGA one. When the main villain is revealed the motivation has something to do with anger over women’s perceived submissiveness, but the screenplay could have used another pass to make any of this sound logical.
The political commentary of “Honey Don’t!” also feels thin because Coen doesn’t have a strong grasp on his setting. Working with cinematographer Ari Wegner, he offers up visuals that showcase the barrenness of the landscape and the rundown surroundings, but we never really get a sense of the social fabric of the place. My mind couldn’t help wander over to “Fargo,” the Coens’ best known crime comedy where the setting shapes what we know about the people we’re watching. In “Honey Don’t!” when people talk about being from Bakersfield, I don’t really know what that means, exactly.
This especially starts to grate when their respective upbringing in the place becomes a point of contention between Honey and MG. It’s a shame because, at least for a little bit, the one place where “Honey Don’t!” excels is in the chemistry between those two performers. That’s also where the twist on noir conventions becomes clever. Plaza is a particularly butch femme fatale, wooing the daintier P.I. by fingering her in public at a bar.
But good sex does not make a relationship, and it’s not enough to sustain a movie either.
Grade: C-
“Honey Don’t” premiered at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival. Focus Features will release it in theaters on Friday, August 22.
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