The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison enjoys HONEY DON'T! (Ethan Coen, USA, 2025)

Margaret Qualley

I rate Honey Don't! Pretty much the most enjoyable movie since - well - Drive Away Dolls, the first part of Ethan Coen's proposed trilogy with Margaret Qualley in her P.I. Honey O'Donahue character. The new instalment offers all the things that make these enjoyable - raunchy sex, ultra-violence, bad taste, smart film craft and substantial borrowings from some of the best crime films that pre-date it - The Big Sleep, The Naked City, Chinatown - Hitchcock represented by lots of Psycho,  along with Torn Curtain & Topaz. Throw in Jessica Jones and add the parched Bakersfield L.A. settings they absorbed from Fat City.  

David Z. Obadiah’s attention-getting titles have the camera rolling through that scorched desert suburb and locking onto local business names painted on walls, proving to be the film’s credits. The most conspicuous streetscape feature is  coach stop benches.  These get to be significant. Lera Abova, the Russian lady from Luc Besson’s Anna, shows up on her moped at a remote highway car smash, where the wreck has rolled into an isolated ravine. The suspended body of the girl driver is still bleeding.  Abova prizes the “Four Way Temple” ring off a dead hand before going off to float naked in an abandoned mine pond.

 

Some time later Margaret Qualley drives her classic turquoise Chevy SS up to what has now become plainclothes cop Charlie Day’s crime scene and there’s this exchange about what either one is doing at a traffic accident.  Day keeps on coming on for Qualley, tall in her loose fitting outfit and heels, despite her telling him “I like girls.” She gets better information out of records storage-cage  officer Aubrey Plaza.

 

Turns out the dead girl had hired Qualley before they had a chance to meet. Her working an already closed case is the most Chandler element. The piece is closer to Mickey Spillane. Think of Honey Don’t! as the Kiss Me Deadly of our time. 

 

Chris Evans

Investigations keep on indicating charismatic Reverend  Chris Evans, who pounces on the chance to come on as something other than Captain America with a beard. As with Drive Away Dolls’ Congressman Mat Damon, also promoted with family values bill boards, Rev. Evans is a sleazy populist leader. His shadowy Russian connections, add to  the character’s contemporary resonance.

 

The service he gives to a congregation of marginals in their best clothes, about God’s demands and noodle, is a super-charged highlight. The Preacher also has other interests including Motel Parking Lot dope deals and threesomes with bondage gear girls in the Sacristy. These get to involve vengeful henchman Jacnier, who we were just getting to like. Qualley/O'Donahue finds a choir smock and fetishist leather and chains under the bed in her late client’s family home. 

 

There’s maybe related complications in the chaotic domestic situation of the investigator’s sister Kristen Connolly and punk niece, diner waitress Talia Ryder, who shows up roughed up by a trailer-trash boy friend. The scene where Qualley sorts him out (smashing his sawn-off proves harder than it looks) is another of the film’s surprise highlights.

 

With her secretary Gabby Beans giving Qualley a hard time when her boss picks up the ‘phone calls that are her job, it’s all a bit much for her and she finds release with Plaza in material more explicit than we’ve seen either do before. The downwards take of the pair of them, naked, smoking in bed, is done in a single run of the camera. Critics who seem to miss everything else in the film pick up on the shot of dildos (also pivotal in Drive Away Dolls) soaking in the sink next morning. Think the ripped papers flushed in Pyscho’s toilet bowl for a similar disruption of movie taboos that hadn’t occurred to us before.

 

Along with the shock value material and the nostalgia content, Honey Don’t! keeps on fielding walk-ons that could have classed up earlier Coen Brothers efforts - Patrick Swayze’s brother as the piano bar man who makes his line about smiling register by a menacing leer, Michael Gmur’s brief, unmotivated monologue about the bus he’s driving or homeless man Kale Browne who proves to be more than he seems. In any other film they would stand out. 

 

Aubrey Plaza, Margaret Qualley

It takes a while to establish that there’s something going on here than we never got in Drive Away Dolls but wait. One of the film’s core purposes is to set Qualley’s star status but it’s more remarkable to see Aubrey Plaza, conspicuous for a decade, abruptly finding her character. Think Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat.

We’ve now got IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes (both U.S. but incorporating some foreign language sources) and an alarming thing is that reviewers all seem to be queuing up to say the same thing  - like the bogus consensus of that Sight & Sound poll. They all home in on the dildos. However the Mickey Spillane thing totally passes them by. They can’t all be too young for that. One element that puts writers off is apparently unmotivated content. In a scheme where information is planted with such precision (the retrieved ring, a Rolodex that doesn’t have Plaza’s address, green lipstick on the tea cup) it seems hard to believe that we are not going to get more clues. I’m still wondering about who offed the car smash client but my guess is that all is to be revealed in Go Beavers, the proposed third film. No word yet on how that one is going. Personally, I've had such a kick out of the first pair I can’t wait.