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The Coen brothers have crafted some of the finest, funniest cinema and their desire to split and pursue separate projects is one of those things where you wonder if the world would be better if they just reunited. (For the record, I also think this could happen if Hall and Oates reunited but, alas.) If anything, the movies would have to be better if only because what Ethan Coen’s been cooking up lately hasn’t been particularly good.

To be fair, his latest feature, Honey Don’t, is infinitely better than his last feature—2024’s Drive-Away Dolls—but that isn’t saying much. It’s like saying eating dirt is better than eating shit. The films Coen’s making with his wife, co-screenwriter Tricia Cooke just lack any particular humor or sense of story structure in favor of kooky characters who enjoy spending screen time engaged in laboriously long sex scenes. In the case of Honey Don’t, there are glimmers of the humor found in the likes of Fargo but they fly by in favor of a haphazard mystery that falls apart, and a heroine more content to find a reason to get into bed than to actually solve said mystery.

Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is a private investigator who discovers a client she was supposed to meet has died under suspicious circumstances. Her attempt to find out who killed her leads her to a roadside church called the Four Way Temple led by the charismatic (and perpetually horny), Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans). Along the way Honey meets a lonely cop, MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), who makes Honey wonder if it’s time for her to settle down.

There’s a moment early in Honey Don't wherein Qualley saunters into the local police station, impeccably dressed thanks to costume designer Peggy Schnitzer, and Charlie Day’s perpetually peppy police officer Marty Metakawitch loudly yells, “Honey O’Donahue.” His character will refer to her exclusively by her full name throughout the entire movie. He will also find a reason to say her full name in nearly every sentence he utters (when he isn’t chuckling about her quirky lesbianism and asking her out). This is the moment where you either embrace the clunky writing of Honey Don’t or suffer for the mercifully brief 88 minute runtime.

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Coen and Cooke delineate characters into those who have only one gimmick—Day and his desire to use Honey’s full name—and those who actually feel like quirky people. In this case, nearly everyone feels like the former and only Qualley is the latter. Her Honey…..O’Donahue feels like a character ripped directly from a Dashiell Hammett novel. You could see Lauren Bacall or Barbara Stanwyck playing the character, albeit probably with less anal beads and vibrators involved.

Qualley commits to the character—and a questionable accent that, for a girl seemingly from Bakersfield, sounds a lot more Texan—who is tenacious in her desire to solve the mystery, while also being the surrogate mother to her sister’s ever increasing brood of children. Honey’s personal life, when it’s not about sex, is about parsing her adulthood with her bad childhood—a father who abandoned her, a mother who died. Part of her relationship with Plaza’s MG is about dealing with the fact that both of them are terrible at relationships. Qualley is able to make Honey feel less like a cipher and more like the troubled, fucked up person the screenwriters no doubt attempted to make her.

But there’s supposed to be an actual mystery here and while it isn’t much, it does exist. The problem is there’s little depth to it. Her “investigation,” what little she does, takes her to the Four Way Church, which appears to be a joke considering how often its owner is engaged in sex with multiple partners. There’s little to parse out of the story. What you think is happening at the church is, period. It’s mostly an excuse to give Evans an opportunity to play the smarmy cad he’s played better in other movies, infused with a lot more female nudity. There’s a whole plot point about the church pissing off “the French,” whose emissary is a shadowy woman called Cher (Lera Abova). Who she is, how she fits, and what her aims are are left a complete mystery. But, hey, at least you get to watch Chris Evans perform oral sex on her!

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The lack of sex scenes in movies, in general, is a topic that continues to be fascinating in terms of the generational divide. As a millennial, I miss the sex scene. But I miss sex scenes done well, not ones that just feel like they’re shoved in without any care or concern for their partner the story. The sex scenes in Honey Don’t are a lot like the sex scenes in Drive-Away Dolls. There’s no build-up or seduction. They’re unnecessarily explicit and come off more like a means of titillating the audience than anything passing for organic to the characters. And what’s worse, in Honey Don’t there seem to be more sex than there is actual narrative about the dead woman the movie started with. Hilariously, by the end the plot completely goes off the rails, introducing a serial killer who has to give the audience a ton of exposition in order to make it make sense.

Honey Don’t is something you can certainly watch. Qualley drags this movie to the finish line and she is the best part. The rest of it is a shaggy mess that never gels into anything cohesive. There are better whodunits, better mysteries, better sex scenes in other movies! Honey Don’t indeed.

Honey Don’t hits theaters Friday.

Grade: D-

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