My quick rating – 5.2/10. Bakersfield, 2024. A city that looks like it’s been dressed by a drunk vintage store clerk with half neon vape shops, half smoky jazz clubs that should’ve been condemned in ’48. And in the middle of it all, Honey O’Donahue, a private investigator with two desires, one of them being justice. The other? Well, you’ll find out well before the halfway mark of Honey Don’t! and let’s just say it doesn’t involve a magnifying glass.
Margaret Qualley slips into Honey’s trench coat, fresh from The Substance and ready to squint into the Bakersfield sun like she means business. She’s got the chops, but the movie gives her more bedroom eyes than detective clues. Aubrey Plaza shows up as MG Falcone, an officer of the law and part-time sex toy, because apparently the precinct handbook allows that now. Plaza does her usual dry, sardonic thing, which works great until you realize she’s mostly here to service the script’s hormonal urges. And then there’s Chris Evans, holier-than-thou, sex-crazed Reverend Devlin, who chews his lines like they’re communion wafers dipped in bourbon. Could everyone be exactly as they seem?
The setup promised a noir mystery: a string of strange deaths tied to a church, a P.I. (“dick” would sound weird with the sexual undertones LOL) trying to untangle it, and a detective who can’t wrap his head around the concept of lesbians. But instead of a casebook, we get a scrapbook of sex scenes, all stitched together by Ethan Coen like he was making a mood board for “Hot Noir, Lesbian Edition.” The action scenes—bloody, stylish, a little jagged—are the only moments where the film feels alive. The rest is more like a dream where someone spliced The Big Sleep with late-night cable.
The eccentric characters and confusing time-warp aesthetic might work better if you’re a die-hard Coen fan who enjoys their brand of playful chaos. But even then, this feels undercooked, like a set of quirky ideas thrown in a blender without the glue to make them stick. The best running gag belongs to Charlie Day as Detective Metakawich, whose relentless refusal to believe Honey is a lesbian becomes the movie’s sharpest joke. The best scene, well… let’s just say that dream with Plaza going down on Qualley has finally been realized for you.
The aesthetic—1940s trench coats rubbing elbows with Teslas and smartphone references—is deliberately confusing, and maybe that’s the point. But confusion isn’t the same as depth, and Honey Don’t! feels like it wandered into its own smoke cloud and forgot how to get out. Coen fans might find it a fun watch, if only because it jerks the viewer around enough times to feel like a parody of his earlier work. But when the smoke cleared, I was left with loose ends, unfinished business, and the nagging suspicion this whole thing was built around a single fantasy scene.
In short, the cast looks good, the sex is plentiful, but the story is missing in action. As a noir pastiche, it’s a curiosity. As a movie, it’s more like a series of disconnected events, strung together with sex scenes and eccentricities.
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