Review: 'Honey Don't' is comedy noir that director Ethan Coen doesn't handle as gracefully as he used to with his brother

The detective comedy “Honey Don’t!” stuffs too many half-baked ideas into a truncated narrative — one that strenuously tests Roger Ebert’s rule that “a bad movie is never too short,” because I wonder if director Ethan Coen would have had something here if he allowed his movie a few minutes to let its characters and plot threads breathe. 

What Coen does have is Margaret Qualley, who makes the best out of this bad situation.

Qualley — who starred with Geraldine Viswanathan in Coen’s previous lesbian-centered noir comedy, “Drive-Away Dolls” — plays Honey O’Donahue, a small-time private detective in Bakersfield, Calif. She’s at loose ends because the client who just hired her has inconveniently turned up dead. The cops, embodied by the clueless Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day), decide the woman, Mia Novotny, died in a simple car crash.

Honey’s not sure about that, so she snoops around, trying to figure out why Mia wanted to hire her to begin with. The top of Honey’s suspect list is Rev. Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), a charismatic evangelist who appears in ads for his church all over town. 

Honey senses Rev. Drew is a creep, and that’s without seeing everything we’re seeing — including his bondage-heavy sexual adventures with his parishioners, a murderous flunky (Josh Pafchek) and what appears to be a side hustle in drug trafficking. Rev. Drew is beholden to a mysterious group referred to only as The French., represented by the alluring Cher (played by model-actress Lera Abova), who rides around town on her Vespa.

Honey also is contending with her sister, Heidi (Kristen Connolly), and her many children — most notably Heidi’s rebel teen daughter, Corinne (Talia Ryder). And there’s a flowering romance with MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), a cop who works in the basement of the police station.

Qualley is charming, and impossibly sexy, bantering her way through Bakersfield trying to unravel the mystery — and makes the most out of her underwritten character. (The script is by Coen and his wife, Tricia Cooke; they also wrote “Drive-Away Dolls.”) Qualley’s scenes with Plaza, clothed and naked, are hot enough to pop whatever kernels of popcorn are left unpopped in the bottom of your bucket. 

“Honey Don’t!” often feels like Coen is attempting to rekindle the magical comic noir he and his brother, Joel, created in “The Big Lebowski.” But this movie lacks the control of the narrative Coen had when working with his brother, or even what he displayed working solo on “Drive-Away Dolls.” If we can’t get the Coen brothers back together, can we at least give Joel temporary custody of Qualley?

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‘Honey Don’t!’

★★

Opens Friday, August 22, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong sexual content, graphic nudity, some strong violence, and language. Running time: 88 minutes.