On the surface, Ethan Coen’s Honey Don’t! is a sun-scorched Cali-sploitation detective flick where there’s blood, booze, or body heat behind every door, and our intrepid gumshoe, streetwise P.I. Honey O’Donoghue (Margaret Qualley), is a big fan of all three. But the film wants, in addition to channeling the light touch of Coen’s previous Drive-Away Dolls, to give voice to some very real anger, and the marriage of agendas can feel confused.
Bless the film for trying though. The frequent moments where it finds just the right wavelength of distinctly Coen-esque oddball humor and looming, heavy suspense are electric. Qualley is an arresting screen presence, sparring with her screen partners at lightning speeds while always hinting with striking ease at the emotions swirling within Honey’s head and heart.
Charlie Day’s schlubby cop Marty and Chris Evans’s Christian cult leader Reverend Drew Devlin similarly hit the tonal bullseye. Both ably embody specific male threats to Honey, while the comedy is laser-focused on making them look ridiculous. That’s especially true considering how Honey deflects Devlin’s hilarious and pathetic Zapp Brannigan-esque one-liners and dismantles her niece’s (Talia Ryder) abusive boyfriend (Alexander Carstoiu) without batting an eyelash.
More often than not, however, the vibe is off across Honey Don’t! Aside from the aforementioned scenes, the hit-to-miss ratio of the comedy isn’t exactly favorable. The film is also paced in such a languid, dreamy way that it’s hard to get a grasp on how each scene connects to the larger themes or the larger mystery until fairly late.
Honey Don’t! ultimately reveals itself as being fueled by seething contempt at men refusing to comprehend women who don’t need dick, and contempt at how evangelical Christianity preys on human joy and self-love. There’s power and political necessity in that particular tale being out in the world but less in the misfiring comedy that’s wrapped around it.
Where Honey Don’t! shares most kinship with Drive-Away Dolls is in its joyous portrayal of queer sex as a freeing act of rebellion. Honey Don’t! pushes that film’s envelope a bit further with Honey’s casual relationship with a cop named MG (Aubrey Plaza), namely with a first date that’s a breathtakingly explicit riff on George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez’s banter-filled sex scene in Out of Sight. But unlike Drive Away Dolls, that joy doesn’t linger, giving way to sad, self-loathing complexity later on. The issues brought up about their relationship could genuinely support their own film, but as presented here, they feel perfunctory.
There’s a silent stretch of Honey Don’t! where Honey, wandering the streets of Bakersfield, California, tries to put herself in the headspace of a lost and frightened teenage girl, so as to grasp where she might go for guidance in a dangerous world. It’s only in this brief stretch that the film becomes more explicit and straight-faced about how the world can rob women of power and freedom. Honey Don’t!, though, meanders getting to that point, uncertainly floating from scene to scene of fear and self-loathing occasionally punctuated with quippy banter.
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