Can the Coen Brothers just kiss and make-up already? Look, I get they wanna do their own things. Joel Coen wants to make one-for-one adaptations of Shakespeare classics, and Ethan Coen wants to make movies about Margaret Qualley having sex with women. Both are respectable artistic endeavors. Ethan’s Drive Away Dolls didn’t receive the best reviews, but I actually had a decent enough time with it. It had a lot of that trademark dry Coen humor, a likable cast and a pretty zany style of editing I quite enjoyed. His delve into queer noir cinema with his wife and longtime editor Tricia Cooke certainly isn’t going to be for everybody, but I’ll watch anything if it’s interesting enough. It’s too bad this thing wasn’t.

Honey, Don’t! left me frustrated because, at times, it manages to do a lot right. The performances are quite solid and I found a lot of the humor working on me, but this script is a freaking mess. Plot threads are left dangling, character motivations aren’t fully explored, and the narrative as a whole ended up being incredibly unsatisfying. It doesn’t help that the film has more or less ditched a lot of the creativity that Drive Away Dolls had in the edit, leaving each scene at the mercy of the half-baked writing. Can’t believe they managed to bore me with a movie where Margaret Qualley pegs Aubrey Plaza. 

Private eye Honey O’Danahue becomes caught in a whirlwind of trouble brewing in the dusty city of Bakersfield, California. People are winding up dead, others are going missing, and everyone is incredibly horny. Okay, that last part isn’t really one of the issues. Honey soon finds herself looking into the local church, led by an impassioned and sex-crazed pastor, all while slowly falling in love with a cop named MG. Will she find a connection between the church and these tragedies? Will she manage to make love work despite being reserved? Is anything going to make any sense by the end of it? I feel like you can probably guess that last one.

At least the acting in this is fun to watch for the most part. I really do think the star here is Chris Evans, who plays Reverend Drew Devlin, a not-so-subtle cult leader obsessed with widening his followers’ minds…among other body parts. His cocky, neurotic horndog personality makes for a great stage for Evans to be truly entertaining for the first time in a while. I love him in a good, obnoxious role, and by God, that’s exactly what we get. He’s obviously a snake oil salesman, parodying those loud evangelical type preachers, shouting about God’s plan while also sleeping with every woman that comes through his church. Sure, the role is pretty much what you’d expect from a preacher in a gay crime movie, but that doesn’t make him any less entertaining. I wish I could say that about the rest of the cast though. Margaret Qualley’s Honey is the main character, but she’s such a dry and uninteresting protagonist. Qualley does her best, but all her character is really relegated to is noir cliches with no real nuance. Her deadpan definitely works when it comes to landing the comedy, but as a character, there really isn’t a whole lot to her. Aubrey Plaza’s MG also feels underdeveloped, and when the character goes through a change later in the film, it doesn’t really feel earned. Always good to see Charlie Day, though.

So a lot of the characters are not fully fleshed out, which I guess was intentional to match the artistic direction of the story, which is also not very fleshed out. It’s a murder mystery, but it never really feels like we’re getting to the bottom of anything. There’s plenty of red herrings and misdirections, but everything just feels incredibly disconnected. From Honey, to the church, to a little side conflict involving Honey’s niece Corinne, you would expect these stories to have some kind of clever conversion, but that’s just not the case. So many story elements get introduced but ultimately don’t play any meaningful role in the bigger picture. The church is pushing drugs and murdering people that might expose them, but not only does that hardly have any real impact on the main story, it doesn’t even get resolved in a satisfying or interesting way. Honey’s estranged father randomly comes into the story at one point, adding absolutely nothing to the character’s journey or the mystery. The resolution to the mystery kind of comes out of nowhere and feels super confusing because the script just does not communicate what is happening super clearly. By the time the killer is revealed, we don’t really understand their motivations and reasoning, and once the credits rolled, I was left feeling so deflated because it made it seem like the rest of the movie was just one big waste of time. Most of the time you even forget there’s a mystery, which, I don’t know, seems like it should be at the forefront of your mystery movie.

While the film does have its humor to it, it’s playing it mostly straightlaced the whole time. It’s obviously a contrast to Drive Away Dolls, which used its raunchiness more for laughs rather than eroticism. This film tries to be erotic, almost in a similar vein to Love Lies Bleeding, but it just comes off as awkward. There’s a scene of Honey and MG getting handsy at a bar that tries to be edgy and sexy, but the way this scene is utilized felt pretty clumsy and whose only purpose was to get a rise out of the audience, both literally and metaphorically. Love Lies Bleeding’s similar set up works way better because it feeds into the desperation and isolation that comes from living in a desert town, but here, it really doesn’t mean much. That’s my biggest gripe with the movie; there’s just nothing to it.

Honey, Don’t’s! odes to crime noir feel like parody, its eroticism feels hollow, and its mystery is misconstructed. Outside of giving us a few good performances and some decent laughs, I don’t really know what this film was ultimately trying to accomplish. It isn’t terrible, but it’s a misfire that doesn’t end up being greater than the sum of its parts. It had everything seemingly tee’d up for it, but it just couldn’t land that swing. I never really was left wondering which of the Coen Brothers was the source of the talent, but man, I might be having some thoughts now.

RATING

THE O’DONAHUE

The O’Donahue attempts to capture the dry, dusty setting while also incorporating a few ingredients we know Honey to be a fan of; tequila and grapefruit (haven’t figured out how to instill her love for women yet). So, obviously, this is going to be a bit of a Paloma riff, adding in some bitter notes thanks to the aperol and some vegetal flavors thanks to the sage and peppers. Familiar, yet different enough to give you a unique drinking experience.

INGREDIENTS

• 2oz tequila
• 1/2oz aperol
• 2oz grapefruit juice
• 1/2oz honey
• 2 sage leaves
• 3-4 jalepeno slices (or hot pepper of choice)
• Rim: Tajin
• Garnish: Sage leaf
• Garnish: grapefruit slice

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Coat the rim of a tall glass with lime juice and then coat it with tajin or other chili lime seasoning.
2. Add ingredients to a shaker and shake with ice.
3. Double strain into prepared glass over ice.
4. Garnish with sage leaves and a slice of grapefruit.