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.

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