In “Honey Don’t!,” a straight-shooting private eye named Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) runs around the sketchy side of Bakersfield, Calif., in a red dress and heels. It’s an impractical outfit for checking out a crime scene at the base of a rocky hillside — as she does, in the beginning of the film, to inspect the mysterious circumstances around a young woman’s fatal car crash.
Honey’s looks may scream femme fatale, but she’s more Humphrey Bogart than Barbara Stanwyck, with a shrewd, melancholic gaze and smooth drawl that makes it clear that she’s seen things. Honey’s smarts are no joke, but there’s something cheeky about her girlie get-up — and the way she sticks out amid her drab surroundings. What kind of movie are we in? A hard-boiled detective story? Tongue-in-cheek neo-noir? Screwball thriller?
Since the ’80s, this kind of flipping and reversing of genre templates has been the Coen brothers’ stock in trade. With a penchant for dark humor and absurdity, Joel and Ethan Coen remixed Hollywood genres until the late 2010s, when the brothers began embarking on solo projects.
Ethan Coen directed “Honey Don’t!” and wrote it with his wife, Tricia Cooke, a longtime editor on the brothers’ films. It’s the second narrative feature by the couple and is a kind of sister movie to the first, “Drive-Away Dolls” (2024), which stars Qualley as a freewheeling lesbian who becomes embroiled in a criminal conspiracy that involves a dildo collection. Joel, on the other hand, went for a relatively straightforward (if visually inventive) adaptation of Shakespeare for his first solo work, “The Tragedy of Macbeth” in 2021, so I’m inclined to assume that Ethan is the one with the funny bone, and in Cooke, he’s found a collaborator who seems to match his love for the risqué.
Ticking that naughty box in “Honey Don’t!” is the Rev. Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), the cult leader of a shady organization called the Four-Way Temple. More a vainglorious bro than a mind-bending Svengali, Drew becomes a suspect in the car-crash investigation, though most of the times we see him, he’s in bed with a new parishioner (or three). Naturally, he tries to put the moves on Honey when she goes to his office to question him, but dealing with lusty male suitors isn’t unusual for her. Marty (Charlie Day), her smitten pal in the police department, can’t quite accept that she’s into women. MG (Aubrey Plaza), another cop, has better luck.
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