Honey Don't! Review: A Dull Noir Misfire

"I like the rat in The Departed 's final shot. The symbolic rodent scurries across a railing, a computer-generated flourish after the last in a series of murders and double-crosses. I like its garishness, its surreality, as the inevitable capstone to a movie already overstuffed with blood, jokes, and incomprehensible edits; it makes me laugh every time I see it."

"I preface this with the Departed rat to say that subtlety is not necessarily a virtue. The language in which Honey Don't! hopes to communicate-and butchers like an AI translation tool-is a reliable one: lean, slightly scummy neo-noir. Movies about and for motel rooms. But like Coen and Clarke's first entry in this project, last year's (also Qualley-starring) Drive Away Dolls, Honey Don't! is phony, inert, and oddly effortful, an inexplicably unconvincing pastiche of a style its creators had previously navigated so adeptly."

Honey Don't! is the second film in a planned trilogy of 'lesbian B-movies' from Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. Margaret Qualley stars as Honey, a private investigator who seeks help from cop MG (Aubrey Plaza), leading to double-crossing and a murder that frees a CGI parrot which repeatedly bangs into a window. The film adopts a lean, slightly scummy neo-noir language meant for motel-room stories but comes across as phony, inert, and oddly effortful. The movie reads as an unconvincing pastiche of a style the creators previously navigated more adeptly, transposing the project's setting to present-day Bakersfield.

Read at Pitchfork