“Oh Honey, nooooo.” That was the only thought I had while watching the latest misfire from Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s, Honey, Don’t!‘. I wasn’t wild about Drive Away Dolls, but I wanted to see this duo succeed, especially given this is supposed to be a “lesbian B-movie trilogy”. But now I want them to have a cinematic divorce ASAP. At least Drive Away Dolls at least had a vision and a coherent story, while Honey, Don’t! has neither. It’s just a tangle of half-baked plot threads that wander off into nothingness, leaving only dead air and boredom in its wake.
We follow Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley), a small-town private investigator in rural California, who begins to investigate a series of strange deaths tied to a mysterious church, led by the charismatic Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans).
If Honey, Don’t! has any saving grace, it’s Ethan Coen’s slick eye behind the camera and the ensemble cast doing their absolute best with what they’ve been given. Coen’s visual language is still razor-sharp, leaning back into his crime noir roots, and while the film itself falters, the images at least keep you watching. The cast, meanwhile, is working overtime to wring life out of a script that gives them little more than broad archetypes to play. For the most part, it lands, with Chris Evans being the stand out with his charismatic, charming, yet walking sex offender priest.
But for all their efforts, Honey, Don’t! is still a miserable time at the movies. It doesn’t feel like one cohesive film so much as several half-baked ideas fighting for screen time, scattered across storylines that lead absolutely nowhere. By the time the baffling, out-of-left-field ending arrived, I was left wondering what on Earth Coen and Cooke thought they were doing. It first starts off with an interesting premise, a suspected traffic murder tied to a shady church, with a criminal underworld lurking beneath it all and a magnetic reverend at its center. That is a great hook as it is filled with intrigue and potential. But sadly, this narrative is subsequently dropped and stretches itself thin over a mess of competing arcs that can’t possibly fit into 90minutes. We get a lesbian romance that feels like padding. Honey’s niece goes missing and her abusive father comes back into her life. Oh, and just because, serial killers are wandering through the mix. All of these arcs and many more just feel like stranded plot threads that ultimately add up to nothing. Even the comedy, which might have salvaged some of the chaos, falls flat on its face with not a single laugh from my audience.
At the end of the day, Ethan needs a cinematic divorce from his current partner (and wife) Tricia and reunites with his brother to start making actual good movies again. To be clear, I’m not telling you to divorce your wife, Ethan, but it’s painfully obvious she doesn’t have the chops to be a solid screenwriter when this script can’t even nail the fundamentals of storytelling. Ethan you are too talented a filmmaker to be dragged down by material as flimsy as Honey, Don’t. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
My Rating: D+
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