‘Honey Don’t!’ Review

When the brothers Joel and Ethan Coen announced the dissolution of their directing partnership that had spanned decades, resulting in films successful both critically and commercially, it was inevitable that their solo ventures would be heavily scrutinized. What did each of the brothers bring to the table? What are their specific interests, and what impulses were being necessarily compromised through their working together?

In ‘Honey Don’t!’, Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke have created a sloppy curiosity, with the filmmakers feeling like a cover band playing the hits of a much more successful artist; the mimicked hits being ‘The Big Lebowski’ and ‘Fargo’. Shared elements with those films can be seen here, but the overall effect is messy and inauthentic, lacking the tight storytelling and empathetic humanity present in even the Coen brothers’ darkest films.

‘Honey Don’t!’ follows the investigations of private detective Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) in Bakersfield, California. A woman named Mia reaches out to Honey for help, but before they have a chance to meet in person and discuss the nature of the problem, Mia is found dead from an apparent car accident. Honey refuses to let the case go, leveraging local police resources in Marty (Charlie Day) and MG (Aubrey Plaza) to investigate Mia’s suspicious church, run by the charismatic Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans).

The sense of place is strong throughout the film, with Bakersfield being brought to vivid life as a hot, desolate and hopeless contrast to the more glamorous California typically put to screen. But the characters living in this world feel false, with each performer acting as if they’ve been told they’re playing a caricature and hamming it up accordingly. Qualley, Plaza and Day all seem to talk funny, as if they’re SNL versions of gumshoe detectives from a 1940s film noir. Chris Evans brings a fun energy every time he’s onscreen as a sex obsessed spiritual leader, a fun performance in a film desperate for any spark it can get.

It would be easy to accuse the filmmakers of fetishizing queerness if it wasn’t for the gratuitous moments of all sexuality, queer and otherwise, filling up a shocking amount of screen time for a quick 89 minute movie. Within three minutes of starting, there is full frontal nudity and it seems that Coen and Cooke had a stopwatch while editing the film to ensure that something overtly sexual occurs every fifteen minutes. This prurient directing feels like a distraction from the half-baked mystery that strains at serving as the film’s plot.

The central mystery feels underdeveloped and disorienting, resulting in a climax that subverts expectations but feels less a commentary on an unpredictable, convoluted world where violent people think they’re smarter than they really are than it is a frustrating byproduct of a poorly thought through story. As a protagonist, Honey O’Donahue is oddly passive. She moves all around town, interviewing all the right people, but she doesn’t uncover any clues or discover anything groundbreaking so that she doesn’t solve the mystery so much as she happens to be present when the mystery solves itself in front of her.

If you squint, you can see a world where this movie works. It does, after all, carry so many of the classic Coen brothers tropes – comedy blending with violence; characters who think they’re smarter than everybody else but accidentally dig their own graves in a small town underworld. And there are moments of style throughout the film, both in lines of dialogue and in the filmmaking itself, indicating that even when the story is lacking, Ethan Coen still has the ability to craft a scene for heightened drama. But these standout moments are unfortunately too rare in a movie that cares more about sex than character, failing to go anywhere thematically or dramatically interesting.

Honey Don’t!
Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, some strong violence, and language.
Running Time: 1 hour and 29 minutes

Director Ethan Coen
Writers Ethan Coen, Tricia Cooke
Stars Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans
Rating R
Running Time 89 Minutes
Genres Comedy, Crime, Mystery