Honey Don’t! (2025) is the clearest proof yet that Joel and Ethan Coen really do their best work together. Where Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth sacrificed the brothers’ signature zing for austere craft, and Ethan Coen’s Drive-Away Dolls delivered zippy, featherweight fun, this follow-up lands in a confused middle. It is pitched as the second entry in a planned trilogy of lesbian B-movies led by Margaret Qualley, but the movie feels like scraps of a sharper caper that never found its center.
The premise is pulp on paper. Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is a small-town private investigator poking at a string of bizarre deaths tied to a megachurch called the Four-Way Temple. Its drug-dealing, libido-first pastor, Reverend Drew (Chris Evans), struts into frame like a cartoon wolf. Honey’s inside line at the station and on the sofa is MG (Aubrey Plaza), her cop girlfriend. The case should be a playground for Ethan Coen’s snap and sleaze, yet the tone skitters scene to scene, and the editing keeps stepping on the jokes.
Qualley plays Honey surprisingly straight, all flat affect and forward motion, which might have worked if the world around her matched that cool. Instead Chris Evans barrels in with big, rubbery energy that would be right at home in Burn After Reading or Raising Arizona, creating a two-movie problem inside one frame. Aubrey Plaza, usually a precision instrument, gets stranded by thin writing, and her late-breaking heel turn as the architect of the murders never lands like the movie thinks it does. The confrontation that follows, complete with a stabbing, a villain monologue, a gunshot, and a scalding teapot, should be outrageous. It mostly plays as chaotic noise.
There are flashes of the old Coen bite. A tossed-off visual gag here, a nasty little grace note there, a reminder that Ethan Coen knows how to stage a lowlife procession and let language curdle. But Honey Don’t! keeps tripping over its own winky posture. Scenes feel reassembled rather than directed, the situational comedy rarely builds, and the whole enterprise lacks the grounded spine that once kept even the brothers’ loopiest setups on track. Instead of Raising Arizona momentum, you get The Ladykillers jitters.
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As a star vehicle for Margaret Qualley, Chris Evans, and Aubrey Plaza, this is oddly inert. As a stand-alone noir-goof from Ethan Coen, it is unfocused and airless. Honey Don’t! wants the anything-goes buoyancy of Drive-Away Dolls without doing the hard work of calibrating tone, so it drifts from skit to skit and then collapses under a twist that drains what little tension remained. If this was meant to be a trilogy, it is easy to see why the third chapter may never arrive. Here is hoping the next Coen project finds the brothers back in the same sandbox.
Score: 4/10
Honey Don’t! (2025)
- Cast: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day
- Director: Ethan Coen
- Genre: Comedy, Crime
- Runtime: 89 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: August 22, 2025
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