‘Honey Don’t!’ Review: Margaret Qualley Can’t Crack the Case of This Noir Misfire

A film that’s moderately amusing in fits and starts before its modest pleasures wear painfully thin, “Honey Don’t!” is among the most disappointing films to show at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The disappointment stems from the fact that writer/director Ethan Coen and writer Tricia Cooke had previously made the flawed yet still far more engaging “Drive-Away Dolls” just recently. It wasn’t a groundbreaking film, often stalling out along its central road trip, but it still remains infinitely more fun than the meandering “Honey Don’t!”

This is a film that never decides what it wants to be. Is it a dark comedy about a cultish church who may be up to something nefarious? You think so for a minute, but that soon falls by the wayside. Maybe it’s then a lovingly snarky send-up of classic mystery movies? Nope. The central hook of the film is so threadbare that you are just left waiting for the inevitable twist only to be disappointed by that as well. There are plenty of silly recurring jokes and a collection of quirky characters, but it all exists to cover up just how empty the film itself is at its core. 

The film opens with a crashed car. A mysterious woman, the closest thing we get to a femme fatale, approaches the vehicle and removes a ring from the now-deceased driver. Who is this woman who took the ring? Why did she want it? And is there some broader conspiracy afoot? All this will fall to the only person in Bakersfield, California, who is able to cut to the truth: Honey O’Donahue.

Played by Margaret Qualley, co-star of “Drive-Away Dolls” and the previous festival’s breakout horror hit “The Substance,” she’s a hard-drinking, no-nonsense private investigator who still always keeps her business separate from pleasure. At least, this is something she says she does, but she also will have many a sexual encounter with Aubrey Plaza’s MG, a police officer who is able to match her deadpan humor with ease. When she isn’t getting laid, Honey is doing the best she can to lay down the law by looking into the true cause of the car crash and seeing what Chris Evans’ Reverend Drew (who is really the head of a sex cult) may have to do with it. While this sounds like it could be playful fun in theory, in execution it’s a slog that, for all the movie’s steamy sex scenes, just never picks up the steam when it’s needed.

In visually flat scene after visually flat scene, we get brief pieces of information that seem significant until they suddenly aren’t. Characters, some that are set up to be very important, fade in and out of the story with a growing sense that the film just wanted to create an eccentric ensemble of characters without thinking how to do it in a meaningful way. It’s got some of the broad basics down, often setting up Qualley for some fun retorts here and there, though the more you dig in, the less there is to find. There are bursts of bloody violence that attempt to provide a jolt to the system, but they also just ultimately undercut whatever we thought was going to be worth paying attention to. By the time everything goes off the rails, you’re just left wishing there was something more compelling and comedic to hold onto from the start instead of a promise of something more biting that is never delivered on. 

Though Qualley is by no means bad, the performance here is far more downplayed and, when paired with a superficial script, it’s hard to get wrapped up in whatever the film is trying to do with genre. The problem isn’t that it’s putting itself in conversation with some of the staples of these stories, it’s that it adds nothing remotely interesting of its own to the dialogue. 

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