Honey Don’t!
Directed by Ethan Coen
Written by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke
Starring Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans
Classification 14A; 88 minutes
Opens in select theatres Aug. 22
Honey Don’t!, the second installment of filmmaking duo (and decades-long partners) Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s self-declared “lesbian B-movie trilogy” trades the absurd psychedelic goofiness of its predecessor Drive-Away Dolls, for a mishmash of neo-noir tropes. The two films are the first that Coen has made without his long-time directing partner and brother Joel Coen, and are an intentionally playful homage to genre filmmaking of decades past.
While Coen officially helms the trilogy as the sole credited director (with a third outing – aptly titled Go Beavers – already in development), Cooke and Coen have worked together to materialize their cinematic triptych for the last 20 years. Cooke, who is queer, serves as the films’ writer and producer alongside Coen, and pulls triple duty as editor, drawing heavily from her own experience to build out the trilogy’s story worlds.
Honey Don’t! features relatively less B-movie silliness than Drive-Away Dolls, but remains nevertheless interested in the seedy hypocrisies of small-town U.S.A. Drive-Away Dolls star Margaret Qualley returns, this time playing Honey O’Donahue, a confident femme fatale and private detective tasked with investigating a series of murders tied to a local church, led by the enigmatic Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans).
Like Coen and Cooke’s first entry in the trilogy, Honey Don’t! has a clear and knowingly light sense of politics. And like Qualley’s first character in the series, O’Donahue is unapologetic about her sexuality, roving from woman to woman with unfettered ease – quick to offer razor-sharp rebuffs of the unrelenting sexual advances from the men around her. She possesses a cool born of both grit and 1940s-style glamour, underscored by the film’s compelling cinematographic staging of her character.
Aubrey Plaza, left, and Margaret Qualley, right, in a scene from Honey Don’t!Courtesy of Focus Features/The Associated Press
O’Donahue suffers, however, from a wooden and flat characterization by Qualley, whose deep-voiced and steely-eyed materialization of the role feels like a poor imitation of a screwball-meets-noir lead. While the sharp war of words she trades with male characters such as local detective Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day) offer some of the film’s best moments, her double entendre-laden interactions with women – most notably local cop MG Falcone (played by an equally off-balance Aubrey Plaza) – lack in much-needed substance beyond their racy tête-à-tête.
Where quick, idiosyncratic dialogue has been a strength and hallmark of Coen’s work in the past, here the characters speak to each other in a way that too often feels deeply put-on. In one scene, the masculine-leaning MG flirtatiously calls out to Honey, who is clad in black pumps and Cuban heel stockings, saying, “Love those click-clacking heels!” It’s a moment that should be light and playful (and wonderfully queer) in its self-referentiality, but instead feels heavy with the weight of leaden caricature.
Where Dolls playfully unfolded the wacky cause-and-effect logic of its narrative over the course of its runtime, Honey Don’t! stumbles in trying to effect the same kind of clever entanglements. The film takes almost half of its duration to establish its main action, and seems to trip over the central event rather than build up to it. It’s a story that is more interested in self-signaling as a pulp-style mood board than offering another coyly arranged narrative foundation.
Honey Don’t! also woefully underuses its best cast members and plot points. Chris Evans, in contrast to the film’s leads, strikes a dialed-in, over-the-top tone as a misogynistic messiah who preaches the virtues of the good book while exploiting the most vulnerable of his parishioners. His storyline sorely lacks development, and when combined with the film’s undercooked whodunnit revelation, it makes for a truncated mishmash of narrative elements that don’t add up to much.
While equally light fare, at least Drive-Away Dolls gave us a lesbian caper film grounded in self-aware absurdity and sustained energetic performances. Honey Don’t! attempts another go at a mock, low-brow outing reimagined through a queer lens, but suffers irrevocably from an uncompelling mystery, patterned by a series of gags that leads nowhere.
It is a throwaway film in a trilogy that is already too sparse in substance to sustain such unorganized plotting and characters that feel more like poor imitation than winking homages.
