Fin: ‘Honey Don’t!’ shows lightning doesn’t strike twice for Coen and Cooke

Plus, “Superman actor” dies, too many Rocky statues, the last Chicago newspaper critic, and more in this week’s notes column.

I don’t typically review movies in my weekly notes column, but thanks to the timing of my film-watching this week, I figured I’d get this one in.

Honey Don’t! represents the second in a promised trilogy of films, following the Coen Brothers’ allegedly temporary breakup, that Ethan Coen has made along with his wife and co-screenwriter Tricia Cooke. As the two have said they have a bit of a nontraditional relationship with some queer elements, their work together has a bit more of a queer sensibility than has been typical in the Coens’ work.

This was evident in Drive-Away Dolls, which came out in early 2024 and was one of my favorite movies of the year. Powered by a dynamo of a performance from Margaret Qualley, it was a riotous adventure that felt a lot like vintage Coens, although with a lot more dildos (their work, to date, featured only one, in Burn After Reading.)

The follow-up, Honey Don’t, once again features Qualley as a sharp, very sexually forward lesbian, albeit minus the Southern accent. But the new film reminded me a lot more of a different scene in Burn After Reading: The one at the end where the CIA guys, played by J.K. Simmons and David Rasche, are sitting around trying to parse what the hell just happened in the plot of the movie.

Honey Don’t features another outstanding performance from Margaret Qualley, and the setting and sense of place, in Bakersfield, Calif., is fairly well-executed, despite shooting in New Mexico. This is one of a spate of recent movies that are set in the present day but are made to look like the ‘70s or ‘80s, complete with the heroine favoring old muscle cars and retro equipment.

However, the mystery is both nonsensical and not very interesting, while its resolution is nothing short of mind-boggling.

Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, a private detective in Bakersfield, who, as the film begins, is investigating the apparent auto accident death of a woman, which may not have been an accident after all (the recent Naked Gun reboot, amusingly, had the same inciting incident.)

This eventually leads back to a church called the Four-Way Temple, led by Rev. Drew (Chris Evans), a pastor who seems to have sex with all of his female parishioners, when he’s not overseeing what seems to be a criminal empire. It’s fun seeing Evans as a loathsome douchebag, which he’s good at doing, although the film never really gets around to having anything to say about churches that resemble predatory sex cults.

Honey also falls into a charged romance with a local cop (Aubrey Plaza), that’s every bit as explicit, although not nearly as playful as what we saw in Drive-Away Dolls. And she also feels the need to protect her niece Corinne (Talia Ryder, from Never Rarely Sometimes Always and The Sweet East) from various predators.

The talents of Charlie Day are mostly wasted in a one-note part as a cop who keeps propositioning Honey, although Russian actress Lera Abova makes an impression as a mysterious henchwoman of Evans’.

Coen and Cooke are planning to finish out the trilogy with a horror movie about the reunion of a women’s crew team, allegedly titled Go Beavers. Hopefully it’s more Drive-Away Dolls than Honey Don’t!

Back in the Gap

I want to thank everyone for the kind response to my Gap Theatre piece last week in the Philadelphia Inquirer. I got a lot of nice comments on it- including a share on Instagram from the reigning Oscar winner for Best Picture and Director, Sean Baker.