Honey Don’t! is a Coen car crash

Selfishly, however, I would very much like them to get back in sync sooner rather than later, because the solo Coen era isn’t panning out too well. It started respectably enough: Joel’s 2021 take on The Tragedy of Macbeth was striking and stylish, though you could feel it straining for gravitas. Ethan’s archival Jerry Lee Lewis documentary the following year was a pleasant, hobbyish diversion. It was certainly preferable to his Drive-Away Dolls last year – a garish, effortfully kooky queer crime comedy starring a game Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan, directed by Ethan from a script he wrote with his wife Tricia Cooke. The general reaction from critics and audiences was, “Well, you tried that. Now let’s try something else.”

No such luck. It turns out Cooke and the younger Coen were sufficiently pleased with the film to make it the first in a planned “lesbian B-movie trilogy” of which Honey Don’t! – a film that doesn’t exactly merit the exclamation mark, though the imperative might be apt – is the second. It is perhaps a slightly improved, tighter effort than Drive-Away Dolls, a claim I could make more authoritatively if that film hadn’t so swiftly evaporated from memory. Either way, we’re talking about modest gains.

Honey Don’t! is another crime comedy, though this time in the brighter, leaner register of Californian sunshine noir, and it poses as hard-boiled, though it’s runny and unformed in both style and plot.

Also returning from Drive-Away Dolls is Qualley, a reliably wonderful actor with a relaxed, zazzy air. If Honey Don’t! works on any level, it’s almost entirely down to her. She plays Honey O’Donoghue, a lone-wolf private detective in sleepy Bakersfield, California, who is looking into a single-vehicle crash on a remote desert road that killed a young woman, but doesn’t seem altogether like an accident. The trail leads her to the Four-Way Temple, an iffy-looking church headed by an iffy-looking preacher (Chris Evans, in maximum oily douchebag mode), the name of which is typical of the too-blunt-to-be-funny innuendo that streaks Coen and Cooke’s script.

Honey’s investigations are persistently aggravated and undermined by a bumbling police detective (Charlie Day) who has a dopey crush on her. Happily, she opts for a superior love interest in MG (an under-powered Aubrey Plaza), a cop from the same precinct who is instantly smitten with Honey’s “click-clacking heels”. As well she might be: in a film otherwise crafted with scant care or personality, costume designer Peggy Schnitzer kits Qualley out in an immaculate array of western boots, pencil skirts and high-waisted jeans that clothe her in a brisk 1970s get-shit-done femininity.

But it all feels like dress-up. With a ripe accent and a forthright, no-nonsense demeanour, Qualley gives Honey warmth and some goofy wit, but the scripted character has no real grit or inner life. It seems she became a private investigator solely because that’s what her writers wanted her to be. The storytelling is in worse shape: slack and scattered and desperately short on suspense, it lacks even the atmospherically controlled illogic that was Raymond Chandler’s stock-in-trade.

What’s most frustrating is that Honey Don’t! aspires to the kind of droll genre toughness that, in their prime, the Coen brothers could achieve in their sleep: even a minor joint such as Burn After Reading has more snap, swagger and tonal conviction than this aimless doodle – not to mention more jokes. The siblings might be out of sync, but on his own, Ethan Coen seems out of sorts.

Photograph by Focus Features