‘Honey Don’t!’ Movie Review: Coen & Cooke’s Uneven Follow-Up Is Another Sapphic-Noir Lark
Photo from Focus Features
From Jeremy Kibler
One brother, Ethan Coen, runs solo again in writing and directing another sapphic-noir lark with wife and editor/co-writer Tricia Cooke. Just last year, Drive-Away Dolls marked the beginning of a beautiful friendship between on-screen dynamo Margaret Qualley and Coen & Cooke. It was a shaggy but refreshingly funny lesbians-on-the-road crime farce with an extremely arch tone and so much madcap energy, a dildo-filled briefcase as a MacGuffin, and a dead Pedro Pascal in the very first scene. Their follow-up, Honey Don’t!, has a lot of that same looseness and breeziness, and while it sparks every now and then with all of the ingredients for a blackly comic pulp paperback, it’s much more meandering and uneven.
Margaret Qualley is once again a quick-witted, swaggering force to be reckoned with, this time in click-clackin’ heels as P.I. Honey O’Donahue, who’s an old-fashioned gal in a modern world. In Bakersfield, California, she’s investigating an apparent traffic fatality of a would-be client. This somehow leads to the cult-like church Four-Ways Temple, led by the preening Reverend Drew Devlin (a deliciously sleazy, almost-naked Chris Evans), a sex fiend posing as a pastor. Besides this case, Honey finds time to fall into a sexually charged fling with a surly cop, MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), and be a protective aunt to her niece, Corinne (Talia Ryder), who’s dating an abusive loser with a MAGA bumper sticker on his pickup truck.
Getting in and getting out at 88 minutes, Honey Don’t! goes everywhere and nowhere all at the same time. Luckily, watching it isn’t all for naught, finding plenty of pleasures in moments that are greater than the sum of the movie’s parts. The bloody violence occasionally has that amusingly twisted Coen touch, and some of the exchanges are effortlessly snappy. There’s a rat-tat-tat, sing-songy rhythm to much of the quippy dialogue, particularly whatever comes out of Honey’s mouth. Qualley sells a lot of this, even when a few tongue-twisting lines strain to be clever gumshoe wordplay.
As the subversion of a skirt-chasing private dick, Honey O’Donahue is an irresistible character, but Coen and Cooke’s script never met a blind alley it didn’t want to go down. There’s also a henchman, a Vespa-scooting hit woman, a long-last father, and the cheating husband to one of Honey’s new clients (Billy Eichner) to contend with. This subplot-laden mystery all adds up to an intriguing if insubstantial whole with Margaret Qualley’s hyper-cool, tough-cookie performance coming away as the highlight.
Aubrey Plaza brings a damaged edginess to MG, and with Qualley, they have some sexually uninhibited scenes together that surprisingly manage to juggle sexiness and character insight. On only their second meeting in a crowded bar, MG is so brazen that her two fingers get rather acquainted with Honey between her legs. Even more so than Drive-Away Dolls, this is an unapologetically queer picture with more screen time for dildos (Honey likes to wash them in her kitchen sink).
Chris Evans is charismatic as hell and fun to watch when he plays with his sexiest-man-alive image in that we don’t have to like him, but the part of a prurient pastor remains one-note and cartoony. Charlie Day is a day player as the oblivious homicide detective who repeatedly asks Honey out on a date, even though she tells him she’s into girls (his line delivery of “yeah, sex hookers” is momentarily hilarious). Two standouts existing in the margins are Gabby Beans, who has a sneaky delivery as Honey’s assistant, and Russian-German model Lera Abova, quite alluring as the mysterious woman who opens and closes the film.
In all of its messy pieces that don’t bother fitting together, Honey Don’t! does offer enough to like and recommend, particularly the retro costume design and the fun performances. Without amounting to anything cohesive, it’s a stylish but tossed-off genre exercise that can tide us over until the Coens get back to making movies as brothers.
Rating: 2.5/5
Honey Don’t! is currently in theaters.
