by Charles Kirkland, Jr.
A small-town detective gets drawn into a slew of suspicious deaths that somehow come to close for comfort in Honey Don’t!.
When a prospective client turns up dead in a car accident, Honey O’Donahue finds the coincidence more than accidental and launches into an unsanctioned and unsupported investigation of the death. As most things happen in a small town, Honey finds that her strange coincidence connects with others in the town and seems to center around a loathsome preacher of a local cultish church.
Honey Don’t! is a neo-noir crime comedy film. It is the second screenplay collaboration of husband-and-wife team Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke as writers. The film stars Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Lera Abova, and Chris Evans. The film is directed by Ethan Coen. This is his third directorial effort without his brother Joel Coen with whom he won four Academy Awards out of thirteen nominations.
Honey Don’t! and Drive-Away Dolls (the first collaboration of Coen and Cooke) are tonal siblings by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, both aiming for throwaway, queer-focused escapism, but their thematic ambitions, comedic energy, and narrative impact diverge in notable ways. The films are pitched as part of a ‘lesbian B-movie trilogy,’ but while Drive-Away Dolls is a “deliberately loose, raunchy romp” with a screwball sensibility and zippy, cartoonish filmmaking that channels the madcap energy of early Coen works, Honey Don’t! has a more straight-faced, although meandering neo-noir vibe with “small-town scuzziness” and a hangout-movie feel.
Margaret Qualley stars in both films in two radically different roles. In Drive-Away Dolls, she plays Jamie, a fast-talking, sex-positive agent of chaos who energizes the action and comedy of the film. As Honey O’Donoghue in this movie, Qualley is much more contained as a sharp-dressed and slick-tongued private eye navigating a desert mystery giving the film its noirish atmosphere.
In supporting performances, Chris Evans plays a despicable and disgusting but darkly humorous cult-leader pastor who is more than he seems. Aubrey Plaza plays an innocuous, uninteresting, and awkward police officer who becomes a love interest in the film.
Unlike other noir murder mysteries, Honey is a smart private investigator who really doesn’t solve anything. She moves through the town, and answers seem to fall in her lap more than her finding them. She also seems to spend more time undressed and romancing women in the movie than actually interrogating suspects. The real mystery of the movie is how we got to a conclusion as Honey meanders her way through the film.
Honey Don’t! seems to revel in its aimless and sluggish pacing. It also has a plot that is equally aimless and subpar, launching into various subplots and red herrings and never establishing the central core of a murder whodunit.
Rated R for strong sexual content, lots of graphic nudity, strong violence, and language, Honey Don’t! is a sad, slogfest of a movie that feels twice as long as its runtime actually is (it’s only 90 minutes). It’s not a noir mystery nor is it overtly humorous. Sadly, it doesn’t deliver on any of its intentions. The saddest part is that sometime soon, there will be a third movie plumbing these depths. I, for one, can wait.
Honey Don’t! is in theaters starting August 22, 2025.
Grade: D