Ethan Coen has earned the right to do what­ev­er the hell he wants when it comes to mak­ing art. Whether that trans­lates to what­ev­er the hell WE, the audi­ence, want is anoth­er mat­ter entire­ly, as this new one, co-cre­at­ed with part­ner and long-time edi­tor Tri­cia Cooke, is the blithe­ly incon­se­quen­tial mid­dle chap­ter of a pro­posed tril­o­gy that was kicked off in 2024 with the glibly amus­ing les­bian exploita­tion caper, Dri­ve-Away Dolls (née Dri­ve-Away Dykes).

Hon­ey Don’t! reteams with Dolls star Mar­garet Qual­ley who stars as pow­er-suit­ed pri­vate shamus Hon­ey O’Donahue. She’s inves­ti­gat­ing the strange death of a female parish­ioner from a local super­church run by Chris Evans’ kinky priest Dean. Mean­while, she strikes up a sex­u­al rela­tion­ship with Aubrey Plaza’s low-rank base­ment cop, MG, as the result of some non­cha­lant and covert fin­ger-bang­ing right in the mid­dle of a busy police drink­ing den.

There’s some neat hard­boiled pat­ter and a smat­ter­ing of humour that is nev­er quite able to elic­it more than a know­ing tit­ter. There’s also the nag­ging sense that Qual­ley is too youth­ful to be play­ing this world-weary detec­tive who claims to have seen all the angles before and is repulsed by the trans­gres­sions of absolute­ly no-one. The flip­pant tone also makes it very hard to take any of the more earnest­ly emo­tion­al rela­tion­ships seri­ous­ly, such as that between Honey’s way­ward emo niece who becomes embroiled in this seamy underworld.

The over­rid­ing feel­ing you glean from Hon­ey Don’t is that it’s an exam­ple of two for­mi­da­ble film­mak­ers work­ing in a reg­is­ter that almost punk­ish­ly rejects the intri­ca­cy and breath­tak­ing for­mal panache of their past work. From some­one with The Big Lebows­ki and Miller’s Cross­ing on their CV, this cheeky noir runaround is sad­ly miss­ing a few lay­ers of intrigue and almost any sat­is­fy­ing pay off, opt­ing for more of an eye-rolling, Colum­bo-esque reveal than any­thing with any last­ing impact. And a sex-pos­i­tive stance and a sur­feit of sass can only get you so far in this game.

Coen and Cooke already have the ear­ly pieces in place for the final chap­ter in their lil off-the-cuff tril­o­gy, so there’s still time for them to real­ly pull some­thing out of the bag.

To keep cel­e­brat­ing the craft of film, we have to rely on the sup­port of our mem­bers. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.

The head­line that came on the back of 2024’s Mission:Impossible – Dead Reck­on­ing Part One was that it didn’t make the sort of box office dough that Ethan Hunt and his IMF crew usu­al­ly pull in. So the prospect of a direct sequel seems like a bit of a gam­ble con­sid­er­ing that it’s the con­tin­u­a­tion of a sto­ry that not enough peo­ple were actu­al­ly that inter­est­ed in. 

Yet there’s a sense that the mak­ers of Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble: The Final Reck­on­ing are bit­ing a thumb at the naysay­ers and play­ing the hits one more time, albeit with a lit­tle bit more focus on the pre­vi­ous fea­ture instal­ments, and one par­tic­u­lar­ly mov­ing and intri­cate call­back to Bri­an de Palma’s OG M:I from 1995, when Tom Cruise was rock­ing spiky rather than flop­py cut.

The antag­o­nist of this new film, who was intro­duced in Part One, is The Enti­ty, an out-of-con­trol AI that we dis­cov­er, unsur­pris­ing­ly, is male when Ethan has a chance to inter­face with him direct­ly. This dig­i­tal super­be­ing is in the process of com­man­deer­ing the glob­al arse­nal of nuclear weapons and caus­ing a dooms­day event – but not before its been safe­ly nes­tled in its own inde­struc­tible serv­er room hidey-hole so it can await a new civil­i­sa­tion to grow out of the ash­es, and like­ly ter­rorise them too.

The log­ic goes that the best and only way to defeat a dig­i­tal men­ace is to go ful­ly ana­log, and so the gang kin­da half-heart­ed­ly abide by those rules and head to a sunken sub in the Arc­tic to retrieve a lit­tle hard dri­ve thingy which they’re then able to con­nect to a lit­tle pen dri­ve virus and then, hope­ful­ly, The Enti­ty goes away. It’s a lit­tle more intri­cate than that, but the gist is all you need to be able to get along with this high con­cept stuff. As an ode to the ana­log, it’s cer­tain­ly worth­while, but its com­mit­ment to that theme is rather half-assed.

McQuar­rie is a writer who earned his spurs on heist and noir movies, and the struc­ture of the Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble titles tend to riff on a sim­i­lar struc­ture. It’s one where the audi­ence is regaled with the plan in immac­u­late detail, and then we get to see it exe­cut­ed, often with many hur­dles, upsets and wrong turns. In this case, the main ​“heist” is so com­plex and relies on so many dif­fer­ent vari­ables com­ing togeth­er, that it ends up not mak­ing a whole lot of log­i­cal sense. It’s almost as if the stress­ful vari­a­tions sup­press the rules that have been care­ful­ly laid out beforehand.

Cruise’s per­for­mance in this and many of the McQuar­rie-helmed M:I films is one of des­per­ate fury, as he’s required to oscil­late direct­ly between acro­bat­ic action man mode and an expo­si­tion deliv­ery node, with a heavy side dose of pre­tend­ing not to notice that I’m the mes­si­ah. Yet his ​“act­ing” almost tran­scends the tra­di­tion­al def­i­n­i­tion of the term, and while his face is of course a key asset in his charis­ma arse­nal, he’s the rare exam­ple of a star who is will­ing to express via every part of his body. Robert Bres­son would approve!

It’s also nice to see him lock­ing horns with Esai Morales as The Entity’s boot­boy, Gabriel, who makes ashy design­er stub­ble and avi­a­tor shades look so, so evil. And you prob­a­bly have to hark back to the days of clas­sic Hol­ly­wood to see a main­stream action film where its two main stars are over 60 years old. 

Else­where, the sup­port­ing cast get less of a shake than they did in Part One, with Haley Atwell’s Grace and Pom Klementieff’s atom­ic blond Paris rel­e­gat­ed to gun-tot­ing assis­tants. Simon Pegg’s Ben­ji gets a few decent scenes, yet it’s sad that his char­ac­ter is no longer a com­ic relief, as his wit­ty inter­ven­tions in the ear­li­er films cer­tain­ly relieved them of their slight­ly oppres­sive sense of seriousness.

At its worst, Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble under the McQuar­rie watch has merged lanes with the sim­i­lar­ly-inclined (and more overt­ly throw­away) Fast and Furi­ous fran­chise, and were there to be more of these films in the future (the door is cer­tain­ly left open), then a return to a small­er, more humane palette with odds that amount to a bit more than ​“everyone’s gonna get blown to smithereens,” would be most wel­come. Next time, rather than a grand nos­tal­gic call­back to the 1995 film, why not heed some of its dra­mat­ic lessons too.

To keep cel­e­brat­ing the craft of film, we have to rely on the sup­port of our mem­bers. Join Club LWLies today and receive access to a host of benefits.