Ethan Coen has been pursuing filmmaking on his own for the last several years, and his brother Joel has been doing the same. While Joel directed the spooky black-and-white The Tragedy of Macbeth with Denzel Washington in 2021, Ethan has largely continued the oeuvre that the two of them created together: stylish crime thrillers. Teaming up with his wife, Tricia Cooke, Ethan first cooked up lasy year’s Drive-Away Dolls, starring Margaret Qualley, and now continues what Ethan and Cooke are calling their “lesbian B-movie trilogy” with Honey Don’t!, also starring Qualley. Shades of the loosely connected X horror movie trilogy starring Mia Goth, but a bit less bloody.
Honey Don’t! refers both to the Carl Perkins oldie that’s used as a leitmotif throughout the movie, and also the title character, Honey O’Donahue, a hard-boiled private detective in heels who specializes in murders and missing persons. She investigates three cases in quick succession—two of the former category and one of the latter. She then discovers, as these movies often go, that all her cases are connected in some way. As she performs her detective skills, she becomes intertwined, literally and metaphorically, with a police officer named MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza) who’s as tough as she is. The attraction is instantaneous, and their chemistry is obvious.
Quickly, the separate cases all seem to lead back to the same person, Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), the small-town preacher of a cult-like church who specializes in murder, sex, and the submission of his parishioners. Evans plays this part with glee. Since his long-term role as Captain America, he’s taken many roles where he’s the colorful and foul-mouthed antagonist, most delightfully in Knives Out a few years ago, but also in Deadpool vs. Wolverine and The Materialists, among others. He’s very good at playing bad, and this film is almost worth the price of admission to see him taking bites out of the scenery alone. Each time Devlin and Honey clash, the quips are fast and furious:
Devlin: “You’re fascinating.”
Honey: “And you haven’t even seen the riddle tattooed on my ass.”
Alas, the movie falls apart otherwise. There are many plot threads introduced that aren’t resolved in a satisfactory manner. The ending swerve feels contrived and makes little sense. And Marty, Charlie Day’s police detective character, hits on Honey in every scene he appears in, despite her being a lesbian, a joke that tries to be funny but isn’t the first time, let alone the 10 other times we hear him try to ask her out. Marty! No means no!
All of this culminates in a third act that asks more questions than it answers and resolves absolutely nothing, which will no doubt leave a typical audience confused and rushing out of the theater. The concept of Refrigerator Logic is that a movie seems to hold together while you’re watching it, but later at home when you get a drink from your fridge, it all falls apart in your head. Honey Don’t! is not a good example of this concept, because it doesn’t hold together while you’re watching it, either.
Ethan Coen has made far better movies with his brother, including the stone-cold crime classics Raising Arizona, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski. Though they’ve gone their separate ways for the time being, it remains to be seen if they’ll have to join up again before another classic from Ethan comes along. This isn’t it.
