Chris Evans as a slutty evangelist. The Substance’s Margaret Qualley as a sleuth on the case of a missing woman. Aubrey Plaza as her cop lover. A stack of sex toys. A fork fight. Ethan Coen’s scurrilous new crime caper, the second part of his ‘lesbian B-movie trilogy’ co-written with partner Tricia Cooke, should be a lot of fun. Instead, it’s a sporadically funny nothingburger which, while not as bad as the lamentable Drive-Away Dolls, stills makes you wonder whether his brother Joel was the genius behind the operation all along.
The clever opening credits, mapping out its Californian small-town setting to The Animals’ We Gotta Get Out of This Place, promise a level of inventiveness that just never materialises. Instead, there’s a gumshoe plot purportedly inspired by languid ’70s Chandler adaptations Farewell, My Lovely and The Long Goodbye. But where Coen’s own The Big Lebowski and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice took those same raw materials – a vague mystery, sexy dames and a criminal enterprise capable of violent nastiness – and forged enjoyably self-referential stoner noirs from them, Honey Don’t! is just a meandering yarn without a purpose.
You get the languor but not much else. Interminable Vice, maybe.
Honey Don’t! premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.