Honey Don’t! is the latest outing from Ethan Coen, one half of the legendary directorial duo the Coen Brothers, with Focus Features. It’s been a bit of a bumpy ride since the brothers split, with Ethan helming several movies that have really failed to live up to the type of films he and his brother used to make together. Sadly, his latest outing isn’t doing a single thing to reverse that trend or rewrite the narrative on his filmmaking abilities.

Honey Don’t! Review

Honey Don’t! promises a lot of things. It promises to be a detective thriller. It promises to be a comedy. It even seems to promise some sort of exposure of corruption, at least as much as a comedy can really provide. Unfortunately, it fails on most fronts. The comedy isn’t good, and when there are so many attempted jokes, that’s a really bad thing. The best jokes only got slight breaths and eye rolls, and the worst made me want to get up and leave my theater.

It’s not thrilling, either. Sure, there are some thriller elements like with every detective story, but it’s far from exhilarating. In fact, it’s downright boring, which is one of the cardinal sins a movie can commit. Being bad is one thing, but being boring and utterly disinteresting is another entirely. The film just never manages to capture attention until the very end, but at that point, the sudden escalation feels out of place and jarring.

That is when the movie is at its most interesting, but it fails narratively. There’s a big plot twist at the end, but it feels totally unearned. It comes out of nowhere, with virtually no clues leading into it. It’s a twist for the sake of having a twist, but there’s no work done whatsoever to justify it. It doesn’t fit well thematically, either, but that’s because there’s hardly a theme present throughout the entire runtime. The relationships are totally underdeveloped, too.

Some themes are introduced, but they’re immediately abandoned, such as domestic abuse, workplace toxicity, religious corruption, and more, but they’re just left as loose threads in a wholly disjointed movie. The film also seems to feature a plot and subplot that are meant to come together at the end. They do, but they feel totally disconnected until then, and it feels pushed together rather than organic.

The cast is really wasted here. Margaret Qualley is solid, but she’s not doing anything with any level of depth. The same is true of Chris Evans, but he at least seems to be having a good time playing role totally unlike anything he’s done before. Charlie Day is doing virtually nothing at all, serving only as the guy attempting to change Qualley’s Honey O’Donahue’s sexuality.

Speaking of Qualley and Aubrey Plaza, they both feel like women written by men, which is to say that they don’t act or talk much like real women might. It’s strange, though, because the film was co-written by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke. Still, they feel designed solely for the male gaze. Honey Don’t! feels entirely designed to pander to male eyes, which is not ideal for a movie centered on women.

It’s also just totally half-baked. The threads I mentioned were left unresolved all over the place, but the entire script feels unfinished. It feels like they had 75% of a movie and rushed through the rest. This is painfully evident in some scenes that are totally unnecessary and too long. We see the same shot of Honey O’Donahue’s license plate more than once. It’s a clever reference to the title, but we didn’t need to see it a second time.

Scenes overstay their welcome far too often. It’s a movie that doesn’t even reach 90 minutes, yet it felt like the longest movie of the year. The pacing played a big role in that, too, as it was pretty slow for no reason until the end when they mashed the gas pedal. That only added to the movie’s climax feeling jarring and unearned. It genuinely came out of nowhere and surprised.

It’s not a particularly good-looking film, and it feels like it uses sex, which there is a lot of, to distract from an underwhelming, half-cooked narrative. They try to fill plenty of the runtime with needless sex to extend the movie, which just shouldn’t happen when you’re making a movie that’s about as short as they come. Some sex does advance the plot, but most of it is gratuitous and awkward.

Conclusion

Sadly, with other good movies in theaters right now, there’s no reason to waste your time with Honey Don’t! It has a really cool opening credits scene (which also serves as evidence that they didn’t have a full movie’s worth of plot), but that’s almost it. Chris Evans is fun, but he cannot save the movie from itself. Aside from Ice Cube’s War of the Worlds Amazon ad, this is the worst movie of 2025 so far.

Score: 1.5/5