Ethan Coen’s Neo-Noir Falls Short Despite Strong Performances

August 20, 2025

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In an era where television cowboys are outfitted more frequently with Succession-like empires than pairs of six guns, dusty neo-noirs feel positively anachronistic on the big screen in 2025. But Ethan Coen — a filmmaker with a significant pedigree in the genre since his 1984 debut with his brother Joel, Blood Simple — makes a noble attempt to update its iconography in Honey Don’t, the second of three planned “lesbian B-movies” after the equally scrappy (if moderately more successful) 2022 crime comedy film Drive-Away Dolls.

Like its predecessor, the film was co-scripted by Coen and his real-life partner/longtime collaborator Tricia Cooke. It stars Margaret Qualley, further easing into stardom here as the film’s unflappable namesake. Yet even a joyfully queer reimagining of the genre’s classically hard-boiled protagonists fails to inject enough new energy to maintain consistent intrigue, prompting viewers to seek a resolution to the central mystery well before its comparatively short 89-minute running time elapses.

Qualley (The Substance) plays Honey O’Donaghue, a private investigator whose latest client dies in a car accident – the day before they’re officially supposed to meet. Honey is intrigued by the coincidence, despite the indifference of local law enforcement. She quickly discovers a connection between her client and a local church whose priest, Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), seems to be curating a flock of supporters to satiate his physical needs in exchange for meeting their spiritual ones. In the meantime, she develops an unexpectedly strong connection with police officer MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza) — one ironically predicated on their mutual disinterest in emotional intimacy.

Fans Of The Coens’ Comic Misanthropy Will Find Much To Enjoy Here

Chris Evans preaching with his hands raised in Honey Don't

As in many of the Coens’ previous films, Ethan and Cooke’s portrait of small-town citizenry is comically unflattering. In Honey Don’t, it’s similarly fun to watch. Both Evans and Charlie Day, the latter playing Bakersfield’s incurious homicide detective, play delightful buffoons, more persistent — and harmless — in their romantic pursuit of Honey than capable in their roles within the town. Meanwhile, not unlike Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson in Fargo, Honey mostly manages to outwit each new person she encounters just by being level-headed.

Yet the violence leans more cruelly towards Coen films like The Ladykillers, where there’s almost a mocking delight in watching characters get murdered, regardless of how deserving they are. Mind you, there are a handful of sight gags in those bloody interludes worthy of the duo’s best moments. But the steady elimination of perpetrators (not to mention collateral victims) weighs down what should be an effervescent mystery, eventually underscoring the realization that the reason Honey’s mystery is so tough to solve is because Coen and Cooke overbaked it in the hot sun of its California setting.

Margaret Qualley Cuts An Imposing Silhouette As The Film’s Star

Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley in Honey Don't

After playing high-profile roles in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Poor Things, and The Substance that traded subversively on her coltish beauty, Coen zeroes in on the calculating intelligence that underpinned those and other earlier performances by Qualley to give Honey integrity and an appealing swagger.

There’s a good reason that most of the people she encounters are enthralled, or fully seduced by her, especially with a wardrobe full of impeccably feminine but tough tailoring. With Honey, Qualley moves more confidently toward roles typically reserved for character actors, or at least the versatility of character actors, rather than the ingénues whose lip-biting previously intoxicated her male costars. That Honey treats her sexual conquests more like a male character in a movie like this typically might — as quick to discard them as she is to seduce — not only redefines the phrase “swinging dick” but underscores the fluidity of Qualley’s onscreen iconography.

Further throwing off the squeaky-clean persona of Captain America in his post-MCU career, Evans continues his tour of characters who are either (or both) sociopaths and narcissists with Devlin, a self-serving and deeply corrupt community leader who, in Coen and Cooke’s depiction of Bakersfield, is less a true villain than simply one of a variety of dubious options for spiritual guidance. As Honey’s professional counterpart, Day lends his local detective more depth than a latter-day Barney Fife caricature, but he conveys in Marty a man more interested in impressing people with his job than doing it well.

The other women in Coen and Cooke’s script are perhaps appropriately rendered in more complexity than the men, from Plaza’s MG to Kristen Connolly as Honey’s sister, Gabby Beans as Honey’s receptionist, and Lera Abova as the mysterious Frenchwoman who serves as an invisible lynchpin in the film’s not-quite-connected string of deaths. But even with a stacked screenplay full of formidable female roles, this bloody, small-town mystery ultimately feels too much like a retread of territory that Coen explored to better effect in films with his brother. Does that make Honey Don’t less a film inspired by neo-noir than the genre and sensibility coined singularly by the Coens over two and a half decades of teamwork? Perhaps. Either way, it doesn’t quite live up to what came before it.