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‘Honey Don’t!’ review: Honey, don’t bother!
"Honey Don't!," the new Ethan Coen movie starring Margaret Qualley and Chris Evans, is fitfully funny, but doesn't live up to the Coen brothers' standard.
From their precocious debut film (1984’s “Blood Simple”) to their most recent collaboration (the under-appreciated 2018 Netflix anthology “The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”), sibling directing duo Joel and Ethan Coen (“Fargo,” “The Big Lebowski”) have produced one of the greatest filmographies in the last 50 years of American filmmaking.
Since splitting (at least temporarily), Ethan has focused his efforts on a “lesbian B-movie” trilogy co-written with his wife, Tricia Cooke. The first entry in the trilogy, 2024’s “Drive-Away Dolls,” was a fun but disjointed genre exercise, coasting on ambience and the strength of individual scenes. The second, “Honey Don’t!” plays in a similar register, but with diminishing returns.
“Honey Don’t!” follows Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley), a private investigator working in the desolate outskirts of Bakersfield, California. Though she shares a lot of DNA with hard-boiled gumshoes of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett novels (her main weaknesses are booze and dames), she’s also a thoroughly modern creation. (I don’t recall Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe ever washing their sex toys in the sink.)
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Honey is investigating a series of potentially interlocking mysteries, including that of a woman who died in an auto accident, a man cheating on his boyfriend (Billy Eichner), and a church led by a lecherous preacher (Chris Evans) preying on women with low self-esteem. Honey approaches all of these mysteries with no real degree of hurry, though her innate curiosity leads her to keep pulling at strings that don’t concern her.
There’s more than your fair share of memorable Coen-esque characters populating the margins of this story, including Charlie Day (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) as a clueless police detective, Gabby Beans as Honey’s nonplussed assistant, and Lera Abova as an elegant French hitwoman frequently spied cruising around Bakersfield on a sporty Vespa. And there’s plenty of laugh-out-loud one liners, a hallmark of the Coens’ legendary scripts.
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But the farther you get into the runtime of “Honey Don’t!,” the more you realize that none of these disparate elements have cohered into anything meaningful — or even interesting.
The film’s 89-minute runtime doesn’t allow any character other than Honey to develop into something even remotely three-dimensional. The introduction of Aubrey Plaza as MG Falcone, a member of Bakersfield PD with a sharp wit and a troubled past, briefly offers promise. But the relationship between her and Honey is woefully underdeveloped.
Evans, as the narcissistic clergyman, is cartoonishly evil. It’s nice to see the Sudbury native playing a villain with real malice, unlike lunkhead Lucas Lee of “Scott Pilgrim vs’ the World” or the charming Ransom Drysdale in “Knives Out.” But he’s still not given enough screentime to develop Reverend Drew Devlin into a genuine threat.
“Honey Don’t!” isn’t without its charms. Qualley is a magnetic presence at the center of the film, and some of the technical elements — from Carter Burwell’s score to Peggy Schnitzer’s costume design — are reliably excellent. It’s no surprise that Ethan and Cooke, who met while Cooke was working as a camera department assistant on the Coens’ 1990’s film “Miller’s Crossing,” take the time to highlight many below-the-line collaborators in a stylish opening credits scene filmed on the streets of Bakersfield.
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But more often than not, “Honey Don’t!” feels more like a younger filmmaker raised on the Coen brothers trying their best to ape the pair’s inimitable style. As the credits roll, the only lingering thought is a hope that Ethan and Joel find a way to get their calendars synced up again.
Rating: ** (out of 4)
“Honey Don’t!” is in theaters now.
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