Honey Don't! (2025)

While I appreciated the intention of Ethan Coen's and Tricia Cooke's first installment of their lesbian B-movie trilogy, Drive Away Dolls, I struggled to fully get in tune with its wavelength. The film took large helpings of Coen caper hallmarks and tossed them into the blender with coming-of-age road trip energy and some genuinely weird stylistic decisions. I could see the charm and I lauded the frank sexuality of the film, but the result was more live action cartoon than classic drive-in programmer. Now we have Dolls' spiritual sequel - Honey Don't - which maintains some of the same ethos of its predecessor translated to a neo-noir detective story. Margaret Qualley stars again, this time as the titular private investigator in and around an palpably dusty Bakersfield, CA. The story begins with a classic set up - a potential client for Honey turns up dead. The local police, led by a inept Charlie Day, declare it an accident but Honey starts to tease at the deeper details. She winds up digging into a local cult led by Chris Evans and as well as in bed with a world weary policewoman played by Aubrey Plaza. The plot beats will be recognizable to anyone familiar with pulp detective tropes - drugs, corruption, a missing girl, a femme fatale, even a classic protagonist blackout. However, they don't cohere in a particularly satisfying way and at the end of its brisk 88 minutes, you may find yourself with more questions than answers.

I confess that I quite enjoyed Qualley as Honey O'Donahue. Her hard drinking, hard quipping, sexually motivated if emotionally unavailable P.I. had enough grit and style to appeal even if the character wasn't totally revelatory. I cannot fathom why Coen and Cooke insist on having Qualley do accents, but I found her New York tinged dialogue less distracting than her wildly outsized drawl from the previous film. Oddly, it is revealed that O'Donahue is a local which leaves her accent as much of a mystery as her immaculate 40s inspired wardrobe. This is a common thread throughout the film - aspects of both the plot and the world are introduced and the reasons behind their existence are rarely revealed. It's as if Coen and Cooke were reading Chandler and decided that the success of The Big Sleep is due to the incoherence of its plot and not in spite of it. We're introduced to Reverend Drew Devlin (Evans), his bizarre cult, and the criminal activity that underpins it early in the film - Honey's investigation naturally leads her on a collision course straight to them. Evans accounts reasonably well for himself and it functions as a fair critique of evangelical grifters - but how this figures into the central mystery of the film comes off as flimsy by the finale. Two aspects of Honey do satisfy even after the credits roll - One is some absolutely ridiculous gory violence and the second is the heat between Honey and Aubrey Plaza's MG. Their initial meet and first "date" rekindle some of that fervent sexual energy from Dolls though, as this is a ultimately a more pessimistic film, the good times cannot last. 

I think the attempt here was to capture some of the strange, laconic atmosphere that a handful of the reinvented noirs of the 70s employed (Less Chinatown and more The Big Fix) and that speaks to me. There's an almost dreamlike sequence where Honey considers the existence of the downtrodden in Bakersfield and how that connects to the local bus. It reminded me in a small way of the Art Carney obscurity and personal favorite - The Late Show. I fear I may projecting more of Coen's and Cooke's influences on Honey than what actually turns up on the screen. Of course the tone of those earlier films - not exactly laugh out loud funny, not particularly action packed, deliberately esoteric - didn't win over many fans at the time, either. Whether this is truly reaching back towards those orphaned genre curiosities or just a bit of a muddle will likely require another watch from me - however, I think I'll be happy to do so.