Publication Date: 04-27-2026

Honey Don’t! (2025) review

Dir. Ethan Coen

By: Steve Pulaski

Rating: ★★

If Honey Don’t! was any more weightless and superficial, I would’ve thought it was an early Quentin Dupieux film.

You might remember Drive-Away Dolls, which was released two years ago. Ethan Coen and his wife Tricia Cooke were behind the unapologetically campy retrograde crime-comedy, which dropped Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan into a story about two friends who inadvertently end up ensnared in a murder plot. That film set the stage for what Coen and Cooke billed as their “lesbian B-movie trilogy,” in which Honey Don’t! is now the second leg of the impending tripod. I’m distinctly reminded of another low-budget series: Kevin Smith’s “True North Trilogy.” It started off terrific with Tusk, and then fell apart so badly with Yoga Hosers that the third film, Moose Jaws, still has yet to be greenlit now-10 years later.

Honey Don’t! is no Yoga Hosers; it’s Drive-Away Dolls with rapidly diminishing returns. And that film was already a fluttering diversion instead of a witty, low-key genre hybrid. Drive-Away Dolls felt like it was a rewrite away from being a very good movie. Honey Don’t! feels like it’s a rewrite away from the engine starting without choking.

The ingredients are there for another playful outing, this time with a neo-noir tone as opposed to the (un)predictabilities of a road movie. It sports a cast of champions — Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day, Billy Eichner, and Talia Ryder — a cinematographer in Ari Wegner (The Power of the Dog) who knows how to walk (and photograph) the dusty streets of Bakersfield, and some hardcore lesbian love scenes between Qualley and Plaza, for all you horndogs out there.

But Honey Don’t! reveals itself in record time (it’s only 90 minutes with credits) to be another aimless noodling of insignificant proportions. Qualley stars as Honey O’Donohue (a different character than in Drive-Away Dolls), who arrives on the scene of a fatal car accident in the opening minutes of the film. Day is a clueless homicide detective; a character who only exists to repeatedly ask her on a date despite the open-and-obvious fact that she’s a lesbian. Poor Qualley is all dressed up in bell bottoms, washed-out blouses, and wedge heels with no place to go.

A crucial clue in the victim’s death is her connection to a rinky-poo church run by Evans’ Reverend Drew Devlin, who leads his congregation in animated sermons contrasting his followers from macaroni, for macaroni does “nothing” and doesn’t serve the Lord (it’s one of the film’s funniest scenes, honestly). It’s Evans who finds a great angle for Coen and Cooke’s thin script, equipped with a shit-eating grin, South Park-snark, and Jesse Gemstone-esque command of his church. He likes to lead his young female congregants in “fellowship,” which involves some rough and I would assume unprotected sex.

So, the bodies keep piling up, Honey eventually links with a cagey cop (Plaza) in more ways than one, worries about her niece (Ryder), who has an abusive boyfriend, and soon… a lot of nothing. Coen and Cooke revel in camp to the point where the characters, the bevy of plot-threads, and even the mystery aren’t afforded any depth, let alone stakes. When Drive-Away Dolls was released, Ethan Coen opined that making movies had become a lot of work and more like a job, to the point where it wasn’t enjoyable anymore. Such is the case when you make something your primary source of income. I understood why him and his wife’s first film in this planned trilogy felt so airy. As for Honey Don’t!? I should’ve taken the title seriously as a warning.

My review of Drive-Away Dolls (2024)

Starring: Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, Charlie Day, Kristen Connolly, Billy Eichner, Talia Ryder, Don Swayze. Directed by: Ethan Coen.