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By TeeJay Small
| Published
I recently sat down to watch 2025’s Honey Don’t on Netflix, and quickly learned that the film’s title is actually little more than an instruction manual. The movie offers some really quirky dialogue, solid performances, and a stacked cast of A-listers who I usually love. Unfortunately, the movie has no proper ending, so just about everything leading up to the credits feels like a gigantic waste of time. When the credit scroll began, I genuinely felt like I must have somehow received a bootlegged copy of the film which mistakenly cut off the entire final act.
A Hard-Boiled Noir Comedy
Let’s get into it. Honey Don’t is a neo-noir black comedy written and directed by Joel Coen. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Joel is one half of the famed Coen brothers filmmaking duo, responsible for delivering such classics as The Big Lebowski, Fargoand Burn After Reading. Known for their quirky and stylized material, I went into this film expecting something a little out there, but walked away super disappointed. My frustration was only exacerbated by the insane amount of star power in this cast, which consists of Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Chris Evans, and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia‘s Charlie Day.
The plot of Honey Don’t centers on the eponymous Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley). She’s a slick-talking private detective with an eye for beautiful women and even more beautiful classic cars. After a concerned late-night call from a client, Honey wakes up to learn that a young woman has been found dead on the side of the road, in a suspicious car wreck. While investigating alongside the local police, Honey locates a stack of self-help books and some funky church robes, cluing her in to some kind of twisted conspiracy.
Meanwhile, Chris Evans portrays a charismatic, womanizing cult leader named Reverend Drew Devlin. Devlin runs a church known as the Four-Way Temple, where he beds young female congregants and forces the men to traffic drugs to fund the practice. He has a series of French suppliers who have become increasingly frustrated with his erratic behavior, which has led to a number of botched hit jobs in recent weeks. Honey catches wind of this operation and, after stopping to spark up a romance with a police officer named MG (Aubrey Plaza), she pops in to question Devlin.
The questioning is repetitive in a way that feels fun, stylized, and referential to a bygone era of hard-boiled mystery noir films, but ultimately goes nowhere. Just when it looks like Honey has no leads left to explore, her own niece goes missing, and she believes Devlin is to blame. Here’s where things go completely off the rails. Devlin’s storyline wraps up with 40 minutes left in the film, when he’s suddenly killed by his French connect. Then, Honey accidentally learns that it’s her own girlfriend targeting and killing young women, and the whole church cult was just a giant red herring.
The Cinematic Equivalent Of A Tuxedo Fart
Coen ham-fists some nonsense about MG hating weak-willed women because of her relationship with her dad or something, but none of it scans, and the entire final act falls flat on its face. To paraphrase a line from Always Sunny‘s Dennis Reynolds, the entire film is just a series of crime, then sex scenes, then crime, penetration, crime, penetration, until it just sort of … ends.
Do you remember that job interview scene from the movie Step Brotherswhere Seth Rogen digs the vibe of the brothers, and lauds their decision to wear tuxedos instead of suits? Then, after a bout of uncontrollable flatulence, Rogen rethinks his entire position on the brothers, and remarks “now the tuxedos seem kind of f-ed up.” That’s a perfect metaphor for how I felt watching this entire movie.
At first, I was pumped about the weird dialogue choices, the period style aesthetic, and that bizarre transatlantic accent Margaret Qualley is halfway pulling off. Once I realized the movie has no ending, and each plot thread goes basically nowhere, all of those things became a frustrating waste of time.
I’m still really disappointed that I didn’t enjoy this movie more, but Honey Don’t is on Netflix now, in case you want to give it a spin for yourself.
