Ethan Coen’s latest comedy caper gives it a go but ends up falling flat

Since the Coen brothers began working on solo efforts, Joel has gone heavy with 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, while Ethan has headed into antic capers, with 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls and now this new crime comedy, which form the first two instalments in what Coen and writing partner Tricia Cooke have termed a “lesbian B-movie trilogy.”

Unfortunately, Honey Don’t! feels like less than half a Coen brothers film. This sun-baked, small-town noir flick comes off as a genre exercise that’s technically slick and self-referential but ultimately empty.

Margaret Qualley (who also starred in Drive-Away Dolls) has effortless screen charisma as Honey O’Donahue, a private eye in Bakersfield, Calif., but as she gets pulled into the town’s seamy underside, the tone is off. Coen and Cooke seem to be aiming for something light and loosey-goosey, with lots of clever nods to the pleasures of 1940s and ’50s pulp, but the quirkiness is forced, the violence gratuitously nasty.

When a young woman who was almost a client turns up dead, Honey feels obligated to investigate. Her search will take her to dark piano bars, deserted dirt roads, rundown housing tracts and a shady church led by the not-so-Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, happily chucking his all-American Eagle Scout image out the window). The pastor refers to sex with his parishioners as “fellowship” and is running a drug ring out the back.

Meanwhile, Honey is kept busy fending off clueless cop Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day), whom she needs for insider police info. (Honey keeps saying, “I like girls,” and Marty keeps saying, “You always say that,” with headshaking bafflement.)

She’s also handling a hot and heavy dalliance with MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), the policewoman who runs the evidence locker, along with some family trouble involving a missing niece.

Cooke and Coen do manage to subvert genre expectations in clever ways. Outfitted in a vaguely ’40s wardrobe — wrap dresses, high-waisted trousers, pencil skirts, silk blouses, stilettoes and stockings with seams — Honey manages to embody two film-noir tropes at the same time, being both the hard-boiled detective and the femme fatale.

Vibrating between 1950s exploitation movie and 2020s empowerment story, Honey Don’t! is feminist, sex-positive and queer. (Cooke is the co-director of Where the Girls Are, a documentary about the annual lesbian-focused festival the Dinah Shore Weekend in Palm Springs, Calif.)

In this revisionist take, the corruption that always pervades the noir universe inevitably comes back to the patriarchy, represented by an array of abusive boyfriends, violent fathers and predatory preachers.

The film wraps its message in some swell-looking design. The opening credits are a bravura bit of scene-setting, and the costuming is minty. The dialogue can be quippy and smart, and Honey lands some good lines — many of which can’t be printed here.

But all the cool vibing doesn’t add up to anything much, a problem that’s underlined by an out-of-nowhere finale that feels a bit cheap.

The film ends up feeling a bit like Honey’s ideal sexual encounter: it’s dirty, fast and fun while it lasts, and then immediately forgotten.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca