Genre: Crime, Dark Comedy
Directed by: Ethan Coen
Starring: Dakota Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans
Release Date: August 22, 2025
Platform: Theatrical
Rating: 2.5/5
By Stephen Lackey
“Margaret Qualley and Aubrey Plaza bring the heat, but not enough to save this wannabe retro detective romp from its own predictability.”
Ethan Coen’s HONEY DON’T! wants to be a clever, retro-styled detective romp, the kind of film where the dialogue snaps like a jazz snare and the mystery pulls you in like cigarette smoke curling in a noir alley. Unfortunately, it never quite earns that cigarette. Or the alley. Or the jazz.
The setup promises something sharper than what we get: an old-school caper framed through modern sensibilities, leaning hard into camp and seduction. But the execution? Imagine someone constantly elbowing you while whispering, “Isn’t this witty?” — except it isn’t. There are stretches where you can feel the screenplay congratulating itself on how clever it thinks it is, and yet the actual lines just land with a thud. Cleverness, like comedy, can’t be announced; it just has to be.
The mystery itself is hardly worth unpacking because the movie doesn’t seem to care about it either. The “twists” are telegraphed so far in advance that by the time revelations arrive, you’re already two steps ahead, and worse — you don’t even care. The stakes are paper-thin, the motivations feel sketched-in, and when you finally get to the “big reveal,” it lands with all the impact of a polite shrug. And that shrug extends to the characters, too. I didn’t care about any of them, which is fatal for a movie like this. In a great detective story, even if the plot falters, you stick around because the characters are magnetic — messy, fascinating, unpredictable. Here, everyone feels like a collection of tropes someone pulled from a retro mood board.
The exception, at least superficially, comes from Aubrey Plaza and Margaret Qualley, whose spicy scenes together are as eye-catching as advertised. Those moments do jolt the film awake, but they’re flashes, not substance. Even they can’t inject enough energy or depth to make this memorable beyond, “Oh right, that one scene.” Two weeks later, you’ll struggle to recall much else.
There are a few mildly funny beats sprinkled throughout — moments where the absurdity clicks and you can almost see the movie it’s trying to be. But those are few and far between, and in between is a lot of dead air where the pacing drags. The film wants to be a chaotic romp but instead stumbles around, too self-aware to fully commit and too shallow to make you invest.
This is the second entry in Ethan Coen’s so-called “lesbian adventure trilogy,” co-written with his wife Tricia Cooke. The first, Drive-Away Dolls, was underwhelming in its own right, but at least it had a certain looseness and charm that made it a breezier watch. HONEY DON’T! lacks even that. It’s a middling middle chapter in a trilogy that hasn’t found its footing. It’s neither subversive nor thrilling, neither truly funny nor genuinely sexy.
