The darkly comedic detective yarn Honey Don’t! finds director and co-writer Ethan Coen making the same mistakes that were made on their last project alongside co-writer and life partner Tricia Cooke. Another trippy, sapphic minded romp that wants to emulate a bunch of different genres at once (and apparently the second in a proposed trilogy I’m starting to hope doesn’t finish), Honey Don’t! is an odd duck of a movie that never comes together in a satisfying way. It has a great cast, stunning visuals, snappy dialogue, and still feels vacuous and hollow. It’s off putting, not necessarily because of its boundary pushing sexuality and bursts of shockingly bloody violence, but because none of this is tethered to anything that can keep it on the tracks for even a scant 90 minutes. It’s off putting in the way that having someone explain their dreams to you in vivid, nonsensical detail is unnerving.
Hard living, tough talking, and proudly queer small town private eye Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) has a new case on her hands, or perhaps more accurately she has the remains of a case that never happened. When a potential client who contacted Honey about help with a situation the police can’t fix turns up dead in a suspicious auto accident, the detective starts sniffing around as to what could’ve happened. A lot of signs point to the deceased being involved in a corrupt, drug dealing, cult-like Christian sect overseen by perpetually horny and lecherous Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), but something isn’t adding up.
Really, nothing in Honey Don’t! adds up to much at all from beginning to end, not from a storytelling perspective, but from a tonal one. With his second major solo outing away from brother Joel, Ethan Coen once again produces a film that has libido and snark to spare, but very little in the way of coherency. As with the marginally lesser Drive Away Dolls before it (also starring Qualley), Honey Don’t! shambles along at a good clip, careening between a variety of tonally discordant scenes held together under the power of sheer horniness. (Which is again, odd, considering that, as far as I can tell, Coen does not identify as a queer women, and the authenticity of taking such a titillating approach is something I can’t stop questioning when watching either of his larks with Cooke and Qualley.) Everything in Honey Don’t! is over-cranked in the extreme, but all the sound, fury, weird accents, and histrionics only add up to exhaustion. One wonders if Honey Don’t! is trying to be annoying on purpose, like someone trying to do a pantomime of a drag show, which is like trying to make a copy of a copy of a copy.
Chris Evans stars as Drew Devlin in writer/director Ethan Coen’s HONEY DON’T!, a Focus Features release.
Credit: Karen Kuehn / © 2025 FOCUS FEATURES LLC
Every scene feels like it was sketched out via stream of consciousness without doing a second pass on the material. Of all the various movies competing for dominance amid Coen’s small frame, the one that works best is whatever one Qualley is leading up. Qualley acclimates herself well to the character of a classic noir gumshoe, and is more than capable of spouting off any number of hardboiled quips and phrases. Her chemistry alongside Aubrey Plaza, as a cop who develops lustful feelings towards Honey, and Charlie Day, as a cop who has always had lustful feelings towards Honey (but is an oblivious doofus), helps to make Honey Don’t! interesting and fitfully funny in key moments.
The exploitation sex romp that Evans is acting in, on the other hand, is less successful, in spite of the actor’s willingness to get more than a little campy. Then there’s a whole bunch of stuff involving an unusually flavourless Billy Eichner, as an aggrieved spouse whose husband is cheating on him, and a subplot about a French sexpot assassin (Lera Abova) employed by the reverend’s European backers. To pile on further, there’s some stuff about Honey’s trad-wife sister (Kristen Connolly) and her troubled, rebellious niece (Talia Ryder) with an abusive boyfriend. Then there’s the stuff about a drug dealer (Jacnier) out for vengeance against the reverend. It’s all way too much, and while all of it technically links up for the sake of the plot, Coen tosses these connections off as if they’re nothing, with no reason to care about anything that’s happening here beyond the aesthetics and vibes, which makes the film’s big reveal more of a shrug than a gut punch.
Just as Drive Away Dolls tried to marry modern thinking with counterculture trip films from the 60s and 70s, Honey Don’t! makes the same mistakes with only a hair’s breadth more success. The world of Honey O’Donahue is one that mixes modern technology with characters who prefer all things old school: landline telephones, muscle cars, dive bars, etc. It’s filmed beautifully, and everything is so visually compelling that it keeps the viewer at least somewhat invested, but Honey Don’t! never establishes a unifying identity outside of being weird for the sake of being weird; doing it for the sake of doing anything. That sounds liberating for the creative people involved, but in practice it’s not great for viewers.
It’s easy to see what would draw noteworthy performers to work on something like Honey Don’t!. Not only is it a chance to work with one half of a revered filmmaking duo, but it offers creative people a chance to go big and broad with their choices and not worry about putting a single foot wrong. Honey Don’t! has vision, not direction. It has energy, but no purpose. It has soul, but no heart. It has the pieces of things that could be great, but nothing to unify them under a coherent or engaging banner. I can see some gravitating to the open and liberating naughtiness of Honey Don’t!, but also just as many finding the film annoying in a try-hard sort of way that’s desperate in its need to impress.
Honey Don’t opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, August 22, 2025.
