By George & Josh Bate
The Coen Brothers are responsible for some of cinema’s greatest movies. Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and The Big Lebowski often come up in conversations about all-time great movies, but the likes of Burn After Reading, Inside Llewyn Davis, Barton Fink, and Raising Arizona also showcase the extent of the filmmaking duo’s talents for over 30 years. After The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, their most recent release as a partnership, the brothers have gone their separate ways, each directing and writing narrative features of their own for the first time in their careers. Joel Coen excelled with the lean and visually striking The Tragedy of Macbeth, while Ethan Coen found less success with the silly and unoriginal B-movie Drive-Away Dolls. Now, Ethan Coen teams up again with his wife Tricia Cooke for Honey Don’t!, the frustratingly aimless second part of their planned “lesbian B-movie trilogy.”
Honey Don’t! stars Margaret Qualley as Honey O’Donahue, a private detective in Bakersfield, California who investigates the suspicious death of a woman. As she investigates, Honey finds herself tangling with an erratic and morally compromised church leader (Chris Evans), a police officer she begins a sexual relationship with (Aubrey Plaza), and a family conflict involving her sister (Kristen Connolly) and niece (Talia Ryder).
Despite its strong cast and promising premise, Honey Don’t! resoundingly disappoints from start to finish. The film sees Ethan Coen operate in familiar tonal territory, with a darkly comedic underbelly to a darker, neo-noir story, albeit with none of the charm and ingenuity that made early Coen Brothers’ efforts so noteworthy. At just 89 minutes and wasting an abundance of runtime on aimless plot threads and unremarkable character beats, the film feels strangely empty. Some films whose productions prematurely concluded due to funding issues feel less cobbled together and more complete than Honey Don’t! The main mystery desperately requires more development and plays more like a plot point the film occasionally revisits when it’s interested, rather than a core feature of the story. When the film does hone in on the mystery, its progression is wayward to say the least as predictable, staggered plotting eventually culminates in a misguided conclusion marked by a jarring reveal that renders much of the preceding film a pointless red herring. Come the end, it is truly puzzling to discern how such a messily crafted script made it to production.
Coupling troubles with plot, Honey Don’t! also stumbles with its tone. As a neo-noir detective tale, Coen’s film features just about every genre trope one would expect, although the inclusion of the necessary ingredients doesn’t result in a satisfying dish. In situating its throwback noir vibes in the present day, there is an off-putting disjointedness to the movie that never quite feels right. Margaret Qualley delivers a performance straight out of a noir tale from the 1950s, but often seems like she’s in an entirely different film than various other characters, whose actors didn’t seem to get the memo about this being a neo-noir. There’s modern technology one second, but then everything seems stripped down the next. There’s dialogue sequences and performances that seem like they could be lifted from a mediocre noir detective movie, while other parts play like a bland present day drama. And, overall, there’s a sense that Honey Don’t! doesn’t quite know what it wants to be and is unwilling to commit wholly to being a present day noir, instead occupying an awkward tonal middle ground.
Much of the film’s attempts at humor come from Qualley’s straightforward, no-nonsense, old-fashioned delivery of disappointingly dull dialogue. Qualley delivers her lines like there’s a big punch or gag waiting at the end of every one of them, but seldom is there a genuine laugh to be had in the film, such is the blandness and lack of creativity in the writing. The acclaimed actress does her best with the material at her disposal, but even her on-screen magnetism fails to salvage what is an otherwise hollow viewing experience.
A running gag about Charlie Day’s police officer being interested in Qualley’s Honey, despite Honey being lesbian, grows tired quickly, while the half-naked Chris Evans shouting at his minions and cracking over-the-top villainous smiles do little to make his cult leader preacher character stand out. The comedic talents of Aubrey Plaza are also wasted as she is similarly marred by poor dialogue and perplexingly transforms into an entirely different character by the film’s end.
Through the blossoming romance between Qualley and Plaza’s characters, Honey Don’t! has a sexual swagger about it that, while certainly more novel than anything else the film has to offer, also feels aimless. A surprisingly sizable chunk of the brief runtime is dedicated to nudity and sex scenes involving the three leading actors. Occasionally, these scenes are played for humor, such as a scene in which a man bursts in with a gun while Chris Evans’ preacher is having a threesome, but, for the most part, the sex in the movie, while confidently depicted, serves very little purpose. In turn, the film is overpopulated with scenes that fail to move the story forward or develop characters in any meaningful way, which is particularly frustrating given how underwritten the main mystery is.
VERDICT: 3.5/10
Half of the Coen Brothers duo creates what feels like half a movie with Honey Don’t! The neo-noir dark comedy from Ethan Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke squanders its strong cast and promising premise with aimless plotting, dull attempts at humor, and tonal disjointedness, ultimately resulting in a strangely empty viewing experience. Margaret Qualley’s on-screen magnetism and Chris Evans chewing up the scenery as a distinctly immoral preacher do very little to salvage a film marred by a woefully underdeveloped story and a conclusion with a jarring twist that renders much of the preceding film quite purposeless. Coen and Cooke imbue the film with a certain sexual swagger, which has the potential to be a more novel and noteworthy element, although this proves similarly misguided. By the end of its brief 89 minute runtime, one can’t help but question how a script so messily cobbled together made its way to the big screen, one masterminded by a filmmaker of Ethan Coen’s standing no less.