The Coen Brothers are a celebrated writer/director duo for a reason. Working together, they’ve made a number of modern-day classics like Fargo, O Brother Where Art Thou?, and No Country for Old Men. Recently, and for reasons I don’t know and am too lazy to look up, Joel and Ethan Coen have gone their separate creative ways. Joel made a really good adaptation of Macbeth with his wife Frances McDormand and Denzel Washington. Ethan? Well, he made some sort of crime comedy involving lesbians called Drive-Away Dolls. I haven’t seen that movie, but I’ve heard nothing good.
Well, it looks like Ethan isn’t done with crime or lesbians because he’s back with both with the new Honey Don’t.
Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is a private investigator, and when a young woman who was coming to hire her for unknown reasons turns up dead in a suspicious car accident, she decides to do a little digging. The dead girl was a member of a cult-like Church led by the charismatic Reverend Drew (Chris Evans), and yes, Drew is up to no good whether it’s some sort of organized crime mishaps or just literally screwing the attractive women of his congregation. Honey, she prefers girls–there’s a weird running gag where Charlie Day’s homicide cop refuses to believe her when she tells him that–and starts a relationship with cop M.G. Falcone (Aubrey Plaza). All the while, she keeps digging into the dead girl’s case, most likely to satisfy her curiosity.
As things get more violent (and oddly incompetent) in Drew’s church/crime organization, Honey keeps looking into…things. So, here’s the deal: for a movie that isn’t even a full 90 minutes long, there is a lot going on here that seems to just happen. The best Coen movies often work off the idea that the best the characters can do is break even. That may very well be the case here. There’s a plot shift, not a twist like happens in something like Fight Club or Gone Girl so much as a shift that sends the movie off in a slightly different direction. The movie wasn’t really working before that point, and it really doesn’t work that well after that point.
That, in a sense, is what’s going on with Honey Don’t: it’s really inconsistent. Qualley, in the lead, is fine. She dresses and shoots off dialogue like she stepped out of an old film noir. Everything about her Honey O’Donahue could have come from one of those old movie if the lead character was a gay woman instead of a straight man. It’s not even uncommon for the Coens, either of them, to make old-fashioned style movies. Why not make a 40s-style noir? I wouldn’t mind something like that at all. The movie can still be set, as this one is, in the modern day with references to Covid and MAGA bumberstickers. There’s just one small problem here: Honey is the only character that appears to be acting that way. MG, Drew, everyone else, they seem very 21st century. Honey alone feels like throwback.
That may be the best explanation for this movie. The pacing is weird, and the plot just wanders all over the place. Like I said, the movie isn’t even a full 90 minutes, and it just wanders. Characters who seem important are disposed of at odd time, and while I have seen the Coens collectively do that sort of thing before–remember, the best a character can hope for is usually just to break even–it just doesn’t work here. I’m ultimately not even sure what sort of story Ethan Coen was trying to tell here. Is it a mystery? A noir? A character study? Whatever it was, it wasn’t very good at any of those things.
Grade: C-
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