Most of the male characters in “Drive-Away Dolls” were dumb. All the sex was explicit, and solely between women. And the violence was the gnarly kind you’d expect from a Coen brother. For example, one person was murdered with a corkscrew.
I liked “Drive-Away Dolls,” which put me in the critical minority. “Honey Don’t!” is such a steep drop in quality that I questioned if my review of that film was wrong. Turns out it wasn’t. But that revisit also made the similarities between the two films more glaring.
Instead of a road movie, “Honey Don’t!” is a sunshine neo-noir — that is, it takes place in the bright sunlight rather than noir’s usual dark alleys and nights. The men are still stupid, the women are still having great sex with each other, and the violence is even gnarlier. Silverware is yet again involved in a murder.
There’s even a butch cop, MG (Aubrey Plaza), who gets involved with Qualley’s character, Honey O’Donahue. Yes, the Honey in “Honey Don’t!” is a name, not a term of endearment. And yes, the title comes from Carl Perkins’s classic rockabilly song.
Additionally, the family values leader this time is Reverend Devlin (a jockstrap-wearing Chris Evans), a Southern-accented preacher whose church advertisements are on billboards and buses all over Bakersfield, Calif. Coen and Cooke add something extra to their formula by staging some intentionally absurd heterosexual sex scenes with Devlin to highlight his hypocrisy.
Like the best detective fiction, there’s a twisty mystery at the center of “Honey Don’t!”. Honey is investigating the death of Mia, a woman who drove off a small cliff just after hiring Honey. In the opening scene, an ominous woman with an extreme bob haircut, and an even more extreme French accent, snatches a ring off Mia’s finger.
Both the French woman and the insignia on Mia’s ring will show up multiple times during Honey’s investigation. The latter is the trademark symbol of Devlin’s church; the former is not the film’s femme fatale. In an intriguing twist that goes absolutely nowhere, the detective’s appearance fits the standard-issue femme fatale description better than the actual femme fatale does.
Honey also has an unnamed office assistant played by Gabby Beans. Beans does wonders with her limited screentime. You get the sense she’s not just a receptionist; she’s also the Miles Archer to Honey’s Sam Spade.
In between having lots of sex — and bearing the brunt of a funny sex toy joke — Honey has to deal with her family and another, lesser case. Her sister, Helen (Kristen Connolly) has more children than the Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe; she’s too busy to see that her eldest, Corinne (Talia Ryder), is involved with an abusive boyfriend. Dealing with him is just one more task on the detective’s Honey Do list.
The other case is a movie gumshoe’s bread and butter — the infidelity stakeout. This one has a queer twist: The client (Billy Eichner) wants Honey to spy on his husband. Turns out the husband is connected to the Mia case. He is dispatched in the film’s most brutal murder after offering up sexual favors to his homophobic drug dealer. That ugly scene, played for laughs it doesn’t earn, is the first of many tonal mistakes the usually reliable Coen makes.
Lest I forgot, Charlie Day co-stars as a cop who can’t get through his thick skull that Honey is not interested in dating him. “I like girls,” she tells him. This unfunny joke is repeated several times.
I get what “Honey Don’t!” is trying to accomplish. Like “Drive-Away Dolls,” this film injects an unapologetic queer sensibility into genre movie proceedings. Cooke, an out lesbian, said as much during the Q&A that followed my screening of the film. But, unlike the previous Qualley collaboration, this one doesn’t do anything with the concept. Devlin’s plotline ends abruptly, and the movie’s true villain feels written in at the last minute just to prove a point.
As an bona fide noirista, I admit that a noir plot is filled with wrong turns, dead ends, and unanswered questions. Remember that the director Howard Hawks once asked Raymond Chandler to clarify a plot point in “The Big Sleep.” Chandler responded “I don’t know” — and he wrote the damn book! But at least those digressions contributed to the overall story.
The one thing “Honey Don’t!” does well is evoking a real sense of its location. Starting with a clever opening-credits sequence that puts the names of the cast and crew on buildings, the film brings its Bakersfield setting to life. (It was shot in Albuquerque.) You can feel the hot desert sun beating down on you. Such a waste of a great mise en scene.
★
HONEY DON’T!
Directed by Ethan Coen. Written by Coen and Tricia Cooke. Starring Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day, Gabby Beats, Kristen Connolly, Billy Eichner, Talia Ryder. At AMC Boston Common, Landmark Kendall Square, Alamo Drafthouse Seaport, AMC Causeway, suburbs. 89 min. R (on the Honey Do list: sex, violence, profanity)
Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe’s film critic.
