Movie Review: Honey Don’t!

By John Corrado

Honey Don’t! is the second solo film from director Ethan Coen, who first split from his brother Joel to make last year’s crime comedy Drive-Away Dolls, a collaboration with his wife and co-writer Tricia Cooke.

This latest, which was also co-written by Coen and Cooke and is the second in their planned “lesbian B-movie trilogy,” is in a similar vein to Drive-Away Dolls, even reuniting them with that film’s star, Margaret Qualley. Like Dolls, Honey Don’t! is another simple throwback to the exploitation flicks of the 1970s, with its blend of dark humour, elements of crime film, and explicit sex scenes.

But the film as a whole is a somewhat flimsy pastiche, that doesn’t really add up to much in the end. This is not to say that Honey Don’t! is a complete write-off; it does have some fun performances, and flashes of entertainment value. But it also leaves us hoping that the Coen Brothers would work together again, because these films – Drive-Away Dolls was also pretty thin – lack much of the spark that the siblings collectively brought to earlier crime comedies like Burn After Reading.

Qualley stars as Honey O’Donahue, a lesbian private detective in a dusty California small town. She is investigating the mysterious car crash death of a young woman, who was a potential client, but this case brings her in contact with an array of colourful characters. Several clues point back to the town’s local religious leader, Reverend Drew (Chris Evans, chewing up the screen), a sleazy pastor who uses his “ministry” to have sex with a multitude of young women.

Down at the station, there’s Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day), the clueless police detective who keeps asking her out (“I like girls,” she has to constantly retort), and MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza, stealing every scene), the female officer who becomes the latest object of Honey’s desires. The film sort of meanders its way between various characters and plot points, none of them particularly fleshed out, with a series of MacGuffins and story threads that are kind of dead ends.

If Honey Don’t! is steeped in the aesthetic of film noir (or the modern “stoner noir” subgenre), the central mystery is never particularly compelling. Coen and Cooke are scratching at a number of ideas, but they don’t go particularly deep with any of them. It can also be a mean-spirited film, with the dark comedy just feeling sort of cruel at certain points. This level of cynicism or nihilism is not uncommon for the Coen Brothers, but Honey Don’t! fails to feel like it has much of a point beyond occasional shock value.

At a brief 89 minutes, Honey Don’t is occasionally entertaining. Qualley does have some fun with the campy characterization, and the film moves at a quick enough pace to pass the time. But it doesn’t add up to much substantial or fulfilling in the end, which makes the whole endeavour feel somewhat frustrating and pretty empty. Though if it’s meant as a throwaway B-movie, that might be the point.