Honey Don’t!

Honey Don’t! is a film that may not work for everyone, and in fact, likely has a very specific audience for which it will. The second film in Ethan Coen’s “Lesbian B-Movie Trilogy” after 2024’s Drive Away Dolls, this film once again stars Margaret Qualley, who was so memorable in the earlier picture. Here, she plays Honey O’Donahue, a private investigator that keeps the personal and professional strictly separate, and who both dresses and speaks like something out of a different era. Obviously deeply committed to her troubled family, she is a superb detective that displays an empathy lacking in her many hookups with various women. As the film begins, a mysterious woman takes a ring off a dead woman at a vehicular crash site and speeds away on a motorbike.

Courtesy Focus Features

As the film progresses, the story winds its way through a sex-cult, drug dealing church, and the various characters there. It is here that the film begins to break. As much as the film is highly entertaining, it also does not hold together as well as it wants to. Where The Big Lebowski weaved disparate elements into a cohesive and satisfying whole, here, Ethan Coen, without the structural integrity of Joel, has created a meandering, yet fascinating and highly entertaining, concoction. Buoyed by a cast that goes for broke, with Qualley and Charlie Day, playing a relentless police detective who keeps trying to get Honey to go on a date with him being the standouts, the film breezes by with its run time of just under 90 minutes.

It is obvious from this film, more than the previous one, that Ethan’s special brand of humor and visual sense is where the Coen brother films get those elements, and it is also very likely those wonderful diversions that seem to go nowhere. Here, however, no matter how fun or worth seeing they might be, they too often wind up as simple dead ends, other than perhaps thematically. Ultimately, the film feels like two stories that do not quite fit together, with a connection you really have to jump through a hoop to make. While this sounds like a completely negative review, it is not.

Courtesy Focus Features

As someone who quite enjoys the old school detective films, Qualley as Honey is a breath of fresh air compared to the dour detectives or put upon police and government agents that typically populate films of this genre. It is commendable, indeed, that the film handles her sexuality bluntly, and in a way that shows this character is entirely comfortable with it, avoiding the cliches one might expect, or fear. This is a character that gives as good as she gets, and she gets a lot. Too bad an entirely pointless section of the film takes up a majority of the run time.

The story, or plot, should be so fortunate. Offering what might be the longest red herring in recent memory, the film does very little setup for its twist, which does not feel as earned as it wants to be. Much like Burn After Reading, the film rushes through plot points and misses out on potentially satisfying connections in order to create a mood and character piece that needs a plot backbone, yet almost entirely lacks one. The saving grace of the film is a multitude of unusual characters, and banter that evokes earlier films and periods.

Courtesy Focus Features

In the end, this is not enough to push the film from the realm of good to great, and even being good is going to depend on how much a viewer can let the experience of the film wash over them and just go with the characters. Perhaps it is asking too much of a “B picture” to offer more than snappy dialogue and interesting people, but it seems a rather glaring omission.

Honey Don’t! is now playing in theaters.