A moderately fun film in adjustment and begins before its modest pleasures are painfully carrying, “Honey Don’t!” is among the most disappointing films to show this year’s Cannes Film Festival. The disappointment stems from the fact that the writer / director Ethan Coen and the writer Tricia Cooke had previously realized the defective but even more engaging. It was not a revolutionary film, often blocking along his road trip, but it is always infinitely more fun than the meander “Honey Don’t!”
This is a film that never decides what he wants to be. Is it a dark comedy about a cult church that can be up to something harmful? You think it for a minute, but it soon falls on the edge of the road. Maybe it is then a sarcastic shipment with love of classical mysteries? No. The central hook of the film is so threadbar that you have just waited for inevitable torsion to be also disappointed with this. There are a lot of idiotic recurring jokes and a collection of original characters, but everything exists to cover how empty the film itself is.
The film opens with a crushed car. A mysterious woman, the closest thing we get a fatal woman, approaches the vehicle and removes a ring from the disappointing driver. Who is this woman who took the ring? Why had she wanted it? And is there a wider conspiracy in progress? All this will fall on the only person of Bakersfield, California, who is able to cut into the truth: Honey O’Donahue.
Played by Margaret Qualley, co-star of “Drive-Away Dolls” and the success of the horror of the previous festival “The substance”, she is a private investigator who did not drink and who still does not always hold her business separated from pleasure. At least, it is something she says she does, but she will also have many sexual meetings with the MG of Aubrey Plaza, a police officer who is able to match his impassive humor with ease. When she is not fucked, Honey does her best to establish the law by examining the real cause of the car accident and seeing what the reverend of Chris Evans drew (who is really the head of a sexual cult) can have to do with that. Although it seems to be fun in theory, in execution, it is an SLOG which, for all the scorching scenes of the film, never picks up steam when it is necessary.
In a visually flat scene after a visually flat scene, we get brief information that seems significant until they are suddenly. The characters, some who are put in place to be very important, fade in and out of history with an increasing feeling that the film just wanted to create an eccentric set of characters without thinking of how to do it significantly. There are some of the bases, often creating Qualley for fun aftershocks here and there, although the more you dig, the less there is to find. There are gusts of bloody violence trying to provide a jolt to the system, but they also finally undermined what we thought we were worth paying attention. When everything goes from rails, you just gave that there is something more convincing and comical to keep from the start instead of a promise of something more biting that is never delivered.
Although Qualley is in no way bad, the performance here is much more minimal and, when associated with a superficial script, it is difficult to end in all that the film tries to do with genre. The problem is not that he puts himself in conversation with some of the stories of these stories, it is that it adds nothing specific to the dialogue.
