Honey Don’t! (now streaming on Peacock) is the second of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s queer-comedy trilogy that began with 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls and will reportedly wrap with the yet-to-be-filmed Go Beavers. Coen (somewhat recently, although hopefully not permanently, creatively divorced from his brother Joel Coen) directs, co-writing with Cooke, his wife, here reuniting with one of their dolls what drove away, Margaret Qualley, who ditches her previous character’s dingbat drawl to play a stylish private eye in the markedly unstylish desert-dusty burg of Bakersfield, California. Qualley plays opposite Aubrey Plaza and Chris Evans in this scattershot lark that steadfastly refuses to cohere – and may find some of us begging for the Coen Bros. to reunite for the greater cinematic good.
The Gist: I don’t know where to begin with this plot, which has something to do with a maniac false-idol preacher, a lesbian cop, untimely deaths, missing fathers, a French lady on a Vespa, a lost teenager, a heartbroken man, an end-of-her rope mother of many children, an idiot police detective, a dead woman in a car and a few other moronic sundries. Drugs, sex and religion are involved. And I am bewildered. So instead let’s talk about our protagonist, Honey O’Donahue, a private dick who doesn’t have a dick and never wants to see or touch a dick, unless it’s a detached prosthetic. It’s kind of a whole thing. Honey’s played by Qualley with a husky voice, an allergy to smiling and a knockout 1940s wardrobe, complete with cherry-red lipstick. She drives her vintage convertible around town and click-clacks her heels down halls, not really solving any crimes. She lives alone. Her only friend seems to be the no-nonsense secretary (Gabby Beans) at her one-woman detective agency. Her sister (Kristen Connelly) has so many children, she might have to go live in a shoe. And she’s interminably horny. She hits ’em and forgets ’em.
So of course, we’re in love with Honey. Don’t expect reciprocation, though. We meet her as she visits what doesn’t look like a crime scene but might nevertheless be a crime scene: A car at the bottom of an embankment, with a woman dead behind the wheel. Looks like an accident. But the woman dialed Honey the day before to set up an appointment. Hmm. This is the first thing in this plot that doesn’t add up, and it won’t be the last, and don’t expect any of these things to add up at all, ever. The idiot police detective (Charlie Day) on the scene asks Honey out. “Marty, I like girls!” Honey says to Marty and Marty replies, “You always say that!” Honey visits a prospective client who’s worried that his partner’s cheating on him. Honey visits her harried sister and the children children everywhere children. Honey visits the parents of the dead woman. Honey gets insider info from the cop who works the evidence room, MG Falcone (Plaza), and they end up at the bar together with hands up skirts, and then at Honey’s place with other things up other places. And we smash-cut to Honey hand-scrubbing her collection of cylindrical sex toys in a soapy sink.
If you’re paying attention, you notice that Honey drives by billboards for something called the Four-Way Temple. The dead woman wore a ring emblazoned with the church logo before it was stolen off the corpse by the French lady on the Vespa (Lera Abova). The church is led by a preacher who we know firsthand likes three-ways with lady constituents in leather and chains. He’s Reverend Drew Devlin (Evans), please note the name. His side gig finds him ordering around brain cell-deficient minions to run drugs for him, or to kill people who might compromise his scuzzy endeavors. He preaches to his flock that they should not be macaroni. “The Pharisees were macaroni!” he bellows, to whoops of approval. Meanwhile, there are sudden bursts of murder here and there. Honey’s niece (Talia Ryder) works at a fast food joint, Weiner Heaven, where she’s stalked by a grizzled old man. Then Honey’s niece goes missing. There are so many things going on in Bakersfield. So many cases to solve. I wonder, has Honey ever solved a case? Probably not. Will this movie ever make any sense? Also probably not.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Although Honey Don’t! isn’t as good as it maybe should be, we need more private-dick movies populated by inept characters, e.g., The Nice Guys. And in the Coen canon, Honey Don’t! drafts on Raising Arizona’s desert setting and madcap humor, and is about as dramatically, morally and thematically satisfying as No Country for Old Men. Which is to say it’s none of those things.
Performance Worth Watching: Qualley has so much all-caps IT in this movie, I can’t stand all-lowercase it. She renders Honey fascinating and mysterious but never – if you’ll pardon my phrasing – impenetrable. To watch her here, you’d think she’s 11 feet tall and ready to brawl with a hulked-out Katy O’Brian from Love Lies Bleeding.
Memorable Dialogue: Devlin tries to recruit Honey to his cult:
Devlin: Why not open yourself up, see what happens? Got nothin’ to lose but your fears.
Honey: Thanks, I’ll stick with my dildo. Helps me open myself and it doesn’t have a creep attached.
Sex and Skin: Piles and piles of it. Piles.
Our Take: More like No Country for Any Men Whatsoever. Or No Sense to Anyone of Any Gender or Sexuality. Honey Don’t! had me flailing, searching for a means of interpreting its bravura aimlessness and plethora of red herrings. Maybe it’s about a point-of-view? Is it an exercise in style? Perhaps it’s nothing more than something that looks great – cinematography, costume design, the tactile dusty grunginess of its setting – and is sometimes funny? Are Coen and Cooke desperately seeking an endorsement by a sex toy manufacturer? Perhaps that’s it; at the very least, the film is absolutely pro-dildo, as both a useful tool and source of comedy.
As much as Qualley and Plaza come together, the film they’re in does not come together. Granted, sex partners needn’t come together in order to enjoy the experience, nor must a movie come together to entertain us or make a statement – which finds me asserting that Honey Don’t is a lesson in irony, because as satisfied as its various sex-havers can be (mostly Qualley and Plaza), its watchers will be far less satisfied. It’s a movie populated with quarter- to one-third-realized orgasms. Narratively speaking, I mean. You’ve heard of coitus interruptus; this movie is dramaticus interruptus. If my parents are reading this, I apologize.
I’m left puzzled, because the pervasive go-nowhere of this film must be a choice. Coen is far too accomplished a filmmaker to simply shrug a film into existence, but his and Cooke’s intent – beyond feasibly setting up a desert as a place to dilly-dally with cameras and actors – remains frustratingly opaque. They struggle to conjure the signature Coenesque tragicomic tone, or the incisive madcap folly of something like The Big Lebowski or Raising Arizona. Although Honey Don’t has no shortage of sly wit or provocation, the laughs are sparse. If it was funnier, or lived up to the promise of a cast that includes Qualley, Plaza and Evans, we’d embrace it as a lark, like we did with the flighty-but-consistent Drive-Away Dolls. Instead, it’s tempting to simply judge Honey Don’t as little more than a faded mimeograph of a Coen Bros. comedy.
Our Call: It really pains me to say this, but dil-don’t bother with this one. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.