Honey Don't!

This was a fun ride.

Have to admit I missed the beginning (late to my seat), & I'm not sure how much.

The characters were fun & the setting was unique.

Enjoyed the main ensemble, all with some fun performances.

Not an over involved story, No Bow tie wrapping, but it felt like real life.

Worth a viewing, but not going to change your life. 😀

Another review said it best when they stated this film and everything but a story. Unfortunately that is very very, very true. Honey don't felt like the characters were created in the world was established, and then they tried to throw a story together at the variant of the process. I recommend a streaming watch because the performances were worth it and again the world. Evans is the sole reason to view this movie.

I just finished watching Honey Don't, and honestly, I left the theater scratching my head. The whole experience was a strange mix of sad, pointless, and-if I'm being blunt-sometimes flat-out boring. It felt like the film was trying to say something profound, but the tone was so off that it missed its mark entirely.

I truly don't know what audience they were aiming for. Too heavy-handed to be light drama, too scattered to be meaningful, and too dull to be entertaining. Characters drifted through scenes without much purpose, and while the story had the bones of something emotional, it never built to anything worth caring about.

The pacing didn't help either. There were long stretches where I caught myself checking the time, waiting for something-anything-to happen. Instead, it kept circling back to the same dreary mood that never paid off.

In the end, I can see why the studio released this movie in the dead zone of late August, right before Labor Day weekend. It feels like one of those "let's just get it out there and move on" kind of releases. Honey Don't isn't the worst film I've ever seen, but it's definitely one I won't be remembering-or recommending-anytime soon.

No matter how many elements a filmmaker may get right in creating a movie, none of them means anything if they're not set within a coherent cinematic context, either thematically or in terms of the picture's central narrative. And, regrettably, that's the problem that plagues the second solo narrative feature outing from writer-director Ethan Coen. This pulpy comedy-drama-crime thriller, which follows the exploits of flamboyant, perpetually "thirsty" small town private detective Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley) in her investigation of a series of unsolved murders apparently tied to mysterious church, successfully incorporates an array of truly captivating qualities - colorful character development, fine performances (particularly by Qualley and in the supporting portrayals of Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans and Charlie Day), a well-crafted production design and a collection of knock-it-out-of-the-park one-liners. In fact, about the only thing that's missing here is a solid, comprehensible story. The picture's disjointed jumble of plot threads - many of them underdeveloped and/or extraneous - meanders along for roughly 90 minutes without ever really going anywhere or saying anything relevant or meaningful. To be sure, "Honey Don't!" has its share of genuinely enjoyable moments, but a handful of modestly memorable instances does not a movie make. And that's unfortunate, given that it seems the picture has many of the ingredients for what could have potentially been an outlandishly funny, wickedly engaging tale. Instead, viewers are left with a plot that aimlessly roams from tangent to tangent and never seems to coalesce into something substantial or integrated, no matter how visually appealing it might be or how effective it is in tickling one's funny bone. And, when the film comes up lacking in this regard, it often falls back on titillating sequences driven by graphic sexuality or edgy violence to shore up its obvious deficiencies, a rather cheap and cheesy way to try and revive sagging audience interest. In that sense, then, this production reminds me very much of the films of such directors as Quentin Tarantino and Paul Thomas Anderson, whose releases, in my view, are often long on style and woefully short on substance. I find all of this rather disappointing, especially in light of Coen's filmography over the years, particularly his many successful productions with his brother Joel. But perhaps that's the key ingredient that's missing here - the collaboration of the two siblings working together to produce truly outstanding works of cinema (and, thankfully, a reunion of the two is said to be in development). Whatever the case, though, it appears the filmmaker's sophomore attempt at working on his own has not yet yielded cinema of the caliber that he's capable of. Let's hope that changes with his next project.

Honey Don't! Has as its main feature the quality of seeming to be tossed off by the director and writers/producers Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, as I am sure the latter and certainly the former has inhaled enough detective novels and movies and other forms of seedy pulp fiction to over-fill a small but sturdy bookstore and know the types and tropes in their bones.

If it feels so loose even under 90 minutes that it even could feel like Coen and Cooke wrote this in a few heated days in a trailer in Bakersfield (or at least with some postcards from the city over their walls), that is a feature and not a bug; there is a sneaky confidence to the filmmaking as Coen is at the point after making films for so long that the "plot" doesn't matter so much as giving the actors some strange dialog to make as real as they can (and thus funnier). This and Drive-Away Dolls and, if it happens, the third movie in this unofficial Shaggy Lesbian-and-Liquor-and-Cigarette Soaked Neo-Noir trilogy are "B" level in what is on the page, and if it feels minor it is mostly because of the insanely high quality of work that Coen has in his Hard-Left-Turn Crime movies (and Cooke as well as co-editor on several films by the brothers).

Thankfully, the filmmakers know how sharp Qualley looks in those heels and suits and understand what power she has as a beauty on screen but more importantly how adept she is at the Coen style of snappy patter that often moves into more serious connotations in the next scene or within the scene (the moment when her father comes a knocking straddles the line between funny and sad and is a perfect example of the amusing melancholy that laces many parts of the second half of this at least).

There are also plum parts for a crude Chris Evans, nearly half of his performance half naked - he seems the most to me, for better or worse, like a character that could easily be in a Coen homage or even rip off (tell me he is not a spot on recurring character for the Fargo TV show) - and Aubrey Plaza, who gets to have such a wild monologue late in the film that it makes the turn into this moment justified (though barely, I'm still not sure how I feel about that without giving too much except that it does give a beat for a kind of critique of internalized misogyny maybe the film needed more time to unpack).

Meanwhile, there is some terrific sensuality as well as absurd moments with that (easy pickings for comedy, sure, but still funny), and some horrific violence that shows that this late-era filmmaker can find new ways to make an audience curdle a bit from common household items in panic mode. I also liked the ways that just by flipping gender a bit we see certain tropes in a familiar but skewed light like with Billy Eighner's few scenes (the kind of actor who makes a full meal out of a school lunch worth of characterization). Again, I can't go to bat for this as something greater than what it is, and yet I think it is only trying to be as clever as it is and not much more. Honey Don't is a highly entertaining lark, no more or less.