‘Honey Don’t!’ Review: A Rare Swing and Miss From a Coen Picture
Following their silly sex crime comedy Drive Away Dolls, Ethan Cohen and Tricia Cooke are reteaming for Honey Don’t!, another raunchy and light-toned comedy and the second of their lesbian B-movie trilogy that instead tries to dip its toes more into the noir and mystery of it all. Unfortunately, in this case, what worked well before with Drive Away Dolls fails to materialize in this shockingly trite follow-up.
Honey, Don’t! is an unfocused film that is at odds with itself, as an entertaining cast is stranded within an underdeveloped screenplay. Plot threads and characters are either so underutilized or are abruptly taken from the story to the point where it feels incomplete.
Despite a great cast and inklings of stylistic charm and look, Honey Don’t! is a film that doesn’t feel committed to the B-movie madness or the noir mystery elements it’s trying to play with.
What’s Honey Don’t! about?
Honey Dont! follows the cases of private investigator Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) within Bakersfield, California. She’s investigating a car crash in which her client died. She suspects this was no simple accident. As she begins uncovering more tracks, it leads her to a church cult led by Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), and a potential suspect within the case.
Within the mystery, more threads are added to this twisted web as Honey’s niece Corinne (Talia Ryder) goes missing within all the chaos. Bodies keep turning up left and right, all with some sort of connection to the church and the followers within it.
The film lacks significant punch for most of the runtime
Honey, Don’t! isn’t devoid of quality, as its charming cast of fun performers still brings some occasional merit. Charlie Day’s running gag throughout the film of hitting on Honey despite her being a lesbian means she can’t date him, is fun. In addition, Qualley provides the film a solid anchor as a determined and badass classic noir lead.
Unfortunately, all the issues with the film lie within its screenplay. Drive Away Dolls was a breezy and fly-by film that, although it might not be everyone’s type of humor, without a doubt felt distinct. It only manages to capture a similar energy in fleeting moments and is a surprisingly stagnant and dull imitation of Coen Brothers films.
Even with B-movie elements clearly all over it, the film never finds a balance between the hit-or-miss humor and serious noir genre prominence. Storylines and plot threads here are picked up and dropped in rapid succession, which leads to the mystery itself being incomplete and ending abruptly.
Characters like Aubrey Plaza’s MG, for instance, have potential as a match for Honey’s more silent type nature, but her talents are largely wasted throughout the film, so she makes virtually no impact as a character.
Even Chris Evans’ role as a creepy but seductive preacher of a church cult gets cut short. Evans does bring a solid amount of laughs to such a despicable character, but his plotline is literally dropped before the film reaches its climax. All small parts that have nice ideas to them are just underutilized in such an incredibly rushed screenplay.
The film works best when it’s at its most playful with the cinematography and characters, even within this mess of a murder mystery. Whenever Ethan Coen decides to play more with split diopter lenses and interesting shot composition, it’s easier to buy into the illogical nature of everything; he just doesn’t do it enough to elevate the underwritten nature of the characters and more hit-or-miss humor that will leave most wanting more.
Final thoughts on Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t!
Honey Don’t! has the potential to capture the sleazy B-movie fun that was present in Drive Away Dolls but falters both as a new genre exploration and as a follow-up to capture the same kinetic energy. The film has wrinkles of potential throughout, and the cast has fun with the given material, but it’s all hampered by a surprisingly dull, convoluted, and drawn-out feature that never fully commits to itself at all, coming across as an unfinished script that Ethan Coen just had lying around.
Like all Coen Brothers films, it’s never truly devoid of quality or be a terrible film to watch, but it’s a jarring misfire even with only one brother at the helm.
Also check out: Review: Drive-Away Dolls is a Coen Crime Caper
