Honey Don’t! (Photo – Focus Features)
“Dead people are the worse,” someone says near the end of Honey Don’t!, a new film by Ethan Coen, one-half of the otherwise excellent Coen Brothers.
Honey Don’t!
Directed by Ethan Coen – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
Dead movies are a close second.
Starring Margaret Qualley as a love-’em-and-leave-’em lesbian detective, the film attempts to be some sort of sun-drenched noir but falls short.
I confess, I was drawn in by the previews that featured a desert landscape. Having had a brother who lived in similar surroundings, and having been impressed by the insular desert community depicted in the recent, and far superior,Eddington, I gave Honey Don’t! a shot.
Bad decision.
The film misses on several fronts. It opens with a body found in an overturned car, but before we can even entertain the thought of a whodunit, the killer is practically shouted at the audience. The plot is further bogged down by an abundance of gratuitous murders, making Honey Don’t! feel more like a compilation of discarded scripts and unsalvageable characters.
What we’re left with is lesbian sex, gruesome violence, a supposed comedic portrayal of a corrupt priest, locals either unshaven or dressed in what looks like Goodwill rejects, and more lesbian sex.
And while I’m not here to argue that Bakersfield is the garden spot of California, there’s something unfair, even elitist, in the way the camera depicts the area as nothing but sleazy bars, fast-food joints, and rundown trailer parks inhabited by abusive men. (And almost all the men in this film are abusive.)
This is all presented through a sickly yellow tint that makes the film feel like a 90-minute hangover.
Although the city does have a functional rapid transit system, despite the motif-like way bus stops are inserted into the movie. “Each one is just like the last one,” a driver tells Honey. What that means, like much of the film’s dialogue, I have no idea.
As for Margaret Qualley, she’s simply too young for the role, and her doe-like features are almost bereft of nuance. To compensate, she stretches her line deliveries, adding a half-beat of delay, and blinks excessively, which I suppose is intended to convey complexity. But instead, it does the opposite.
Meanwhile, Chris Evans, playing the corrupt preacher, is so over the top, or so frequently on top of one of his female parishioners, that he feels like a character from a failed sex comedy.
In short, I suggest thinking of Honey Don’t! not as a marketing tool but as a consumer alert.
> Playing at IPIC Pasadena, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, LOOK Dine-In Cinemas Glendale, AMC Santa Anita 16, and Regal UA La Canada.
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