2025 | rated R | starring Margaret Qualley, Chris Evans, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Kristen Connolly | directed by Ethan Cohen | 1 hr 29 mins | 1 out of 5 |
Everywhere you look, all across the American pop culture, mostly Hollywood, landscape you see people seemingly losing their minds, banging their heads against the wall without a drop of creativity or inspiration inside of them, and yet forced by a job, or their own unknowing hubris, to make content. As a result, we get one baffling creative decision after another at the foundation of these movies that seems to defy all logic, simple storytelling and is completely antagonistic to what audiences want to see. From people whose job it is to know what audiences want to see. We end up with things like a trilogy of The Strangers movies that nobody asked for and nobody cares about, a Scream movie without any meta-horror references and a Jurassic Park movie about locusts.
One of the weirdest things to come down the pipe the last few years is whatever the hell Ethan Cohen and wife Tricia Cooke are doing since the Cohen brother split after The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. While Joel Cohen went off and made The Tragedy of MacBeth, Ethan Cohen has delivered this bizarre series of films, starting with Drive Away Dolls and continuing with Honey Don’t, lesbian-centered crime films starring Margaret Qualley that listlessly flop around without a single laugh, thrill, mystery, engaging character, clever set piece or any of the charm found in a Cohen brother’s film. It’s almost worth pulling apart and dissecting why this movie doesn’t work, but in this case it’s not on a mechanical level. You know that euphoric feeling you get walking out of the theater having just seen a great movie and maybe it had some flaws, but it was more meaningful than the sum of its parts and you just unabashedly loved it in a way that can’t be quantified. Honey Don’t is the opposite of that.
It’s a soul-sucking experience, worse than a movie that simply isn’t funny because of how hard and desperate it is working to gin up some quirky fun. A cinematic machine gunning of second-hand embarrassment form people who think that they are much funnier than they are and have monopolized the attention of the room to tell a long-winded joke that goes nowhere. This movie sits in a time warp, not just in its ambiguous setting, but in where it targets for mockery. Ethan Coen is living in the 90s, rolling out a lesbian sex comedy in 2025 as if he’s Kevin Smith unloading Chasing Amy on an unsuspecting Tipper Gore-era populace and expecting the same level of shock and pearl-clutching. The other barrel in this one-two punch of moldy targets is Chris Evans as a small town reverend who isn’t an honest, god-fearing follower of the faith. Oh my stars, I’ve got the vapors. He uses his position to get sex and money, you don’t say.
Every frame of this movie is like a fly buzzing around your ear trying to poke you with something that nobody cares about and hasn’t for decades. Qualley, to her infinite credit, gets out of this with her dignity. Again, putting on her best 40s gumshoe detective voice, Qualley is ready and waiting for the fun to start and a movie to start to form around her. Charlie Day also is a highlight as a bumbling detective with a crush on Honey. Their scenes are the most tolerable in the movie. But it’s a real feat to get career-low performances out of Chris Evans and Aubrey Plaza. Evans has played an obnoxious jerk before but the magic of Chris Evan was that he could be the jerk that had some charm, here it’s gone. If it seems like I’m being hard on Plaza, just wait until what she turns into in the head-slapping, nonsensical climax.
At a shocking hour and 29 minutes, Honey Don’t feels like an eternity. If you can make it to the end of this endurance trial in one sitting you’re a more patient person than I. There isn’t anything outwardly offensive by it. There is no scene I was shocked or insulted by. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. There is just nothing going on in it. These movies are torturous in a way that deserves study. Men in lab coats in underground bases pouring over every second of it to find out why everything about its construction is repellant.
Oh yeah, and the plot has something to do with a small time private investigator named Honey (Margaret Qualley) who tries to solve the mystery of a friend, found dead in a car accident that pulls the thread on a series of mysterious murders tied to the Four-Way Temple church and it’s ego-maniacal leader (Chris Evans).