Honey Don't!

The second installment in a trilogy of unconnected lesbian action/comedy B-pictures from writer/producer/director Ethan Coen and writer/producer/editor Tricia Cooke is so lazy and half-baked it barely qualifies as a movie. This is the follow-up to the husband and wife duo's 2024 outing, Drive-Away Dolls, which many dismissed as lightweight nonsense, but I thought was much funnier and substantive than many of the comedies the younger Coen has made with his brother Joel (like Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading, and the bizarrely beloved Hail, Caesar!)

Honey, Don't stars Drive-Away's Margaret Qualley, playing another sharp, sassy, hyper-confident young lesbian, this time a bit older and calmer than her character in the previous outing. Honey O'Donahue is a small-town private eye who becomes involved in a series of mysterious deaths that seem to be connected to a cultish church led by a charismatic preacher, annoyingly played by a one-note Chris Evans. The cops, as epitomized by a dimwit homicide dick, annoyingly played by a one-note Charlie Day, dismiss the incident as an accident, but Honey knows better. As she privately investigates, Honey crosses paths with a female cop named MG Falcone, played by the great Aubrey Plaza, whose role is so underdeveloped that it seems like Coen and Cooke assumed the excitement of seeing Qualley and Plaza in the sack together would make up for not writing a script for them.

This movie is so thin, it feels made from an outline rather than a screenplay. It's a vibes picture that asks the audience to invest in the kind of mystery that requires a convoluted plot with twists and turns, red herrings, and blind alleys. A film like this can't just coast along on sunshine noir trappings, repetitive dry comedy, and titillation. The big reveal climax would only work if Plaza had about six more scenes in the movie, and if we cared about any of the characters other than Honey and MG. In addition to MG, Honey has several potentially interesting relationships she needs to contend with over the 89 minutes. There's her sister (Kristen Connolly), her niece (Talia Ryder), her secretary (Gabby Beans), and several others, all played by game, capable actors. Unfortunately, none of these interactions add up to anything either narratively or thematically.