The Coen Brothers “splitting up” in 2018 was a national tragedy for movie fans. With movies like The Big Lebowski and No Country for Old Men, they have been rightly established as two of the best and most consistent filmmakers working today, so to see them going their separate ways was worrying. However, neither brother stayed out of film for long, as Joel Coen returned with the haunting and beautiful The Tragedy of Macbeth starring Denzel Washington in 2021, and Ethan Coen followed suit with a crime-comedy, Drive-Away Dolls, that he directed and cowrote with his wife, Tricia Cooke.
Now, Ethan and Cooke returned with a movie that is in many ways a spiritual successor to his first outing without Joel: Honey Don’t! The film stars Margaret Qualley as Honey Donahue, a private detective thrust into a mystery involving a crashed car with a body in it, a shady church pastored by a hilarious and conniving Chris Evans, and a family member gone missing. At a breezy 89 minutes, Honey Don’t! gives you a flashy and breakneck neo-noir throwback that feels both in the tone of the Coens’ early work and in the spirit of detective stories of the past, sort of a woman-driven spin on one of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels.
Where this film and Drive-Away Dolls are similar is that both act as rapid-paced sendups of the exact type of movie that the Coens started out making together. These are dark, witty crime comedies, either a bag-full-of-money type of deal where an unsuspecting protagonist is on the run and in over their head, or a body-found-on-the-road situation where a detective must root out a criminal conspiracy. Both star Qualley, who is doing especially good work in Honey Don’t!. And both explore a deeper and richer level of sexuality in their storytelling, centering on lesbian characters who are unabashedly queer and unapologetically at odds with the criminal world around them that favors a traditionally male, heterosexual archetype.
Honey Don’t!, like Drive-Away Dolls, is a witty and progressive spin on an old formula. But it differs in that it is a detective story, not a woman-on-the-run story. Qualley steps into a role that asks for a completely different approach in Honey Don’t!, and she is up to the task, delivering a dry and sharp performance as a woman always a step ahead of the people working to evade her. Evans, playing a looming figure over the town’s criminal enterprise and a holier-than-thou reverend, gives one of his freshest performances in years, reminding us all that he can be especially funny when he is allowed. They are joined by Aubrey Plaza as MG, a cop who develops a taste for Honey; Lera Abova as a seductive French woman who works for the criminal operation that oversees the church’s activity; and Charlie Day as a naive police detective who is hopelessly interested in Honey.
Everyone in the cast is doing great work. Day shines as a comedic foil to Honey, and Plaza has great chemistry with her during their brief appearances together. But this is the core problem with Honey Don’t!, and it applies to Drive-Away Dolls as well. So many great actors are assembled, yet we only spend about ten minutes with any one of them. Ethan and Cooke craft a rich tapestry of characters in both of these films, but the runtimes make it so you simply don’t have enough room to get to know any of them.
In Honey Don’t!, it feels like just when the movie will break down below the surface with one of these supporting characters, we are thrown into another unfocused subplot. And as the film races to the end, the disparate characters are written out so quickly that you’ll be surprised how some people never came back into play in the final stretch. The case that Honey pursues ends up resolved in three distinct manners that don’t tie together in an especially satisfying way, especially when an abrupt shift from one particular character comes out of nowhere and resolves before you even have time to process what that means for the larger mystery.
The rushed, sometimes awkward pacing of this movie is its only major flaw. Everything else about it is a fairly successful, delightful genre exercise that reminds us why the Coens became so beloved in the first place. It doesn’t reach the heights of their best work, not touching the likes of Fargo or Raising Arizona in terms of sheer filmmaking craft or narrative acuity. Those are movies that function so perfectly as screenplays that it is hard to imagine anything besting them. But Honey Don’t! is of a piece with these films, a screwy, sexy spin on them. If you are missing the Coens working together, you are doing a disservice by not checking in with what Ethan and Cooke are doing. Honey Don’t! is a loud, proud B-movie with A-level talent on display.
7 out of 10
Honey Don’t! is in theaters now.
This article appears in Aug 1-31, 2025.