You’d love for them all to be winners, but cinephiles have a reliable fallback plan in the field of diagnostics. Unfettered enjoyment will always be preferable, but there’s something pleasurable about seeing a problem and designing its parameters, a mental exercise that leads to good intellectual hygiene, and not a small amount of self-satisfaction. There’s a reason bad movies tend to have a larger legacy than mediocre ones; withering assessments of the former make the viewer feel incisive and sharp, whereas shrugs toward the latter leave the lingering aftertaste of an unfinished process. If you’re not going to make it, it’s probably best to perish in a blaze of glory, guns firing and missing every target, engulfed in the flames of a comically colossal explosion. Death by a thousand cuts is a much nastier business, with the coroner’s arms reaching toward the sky before simply moving on to the next examination. 

Appraising the modest failure of a movie like Honey Don’t! comes with more questions than answers, pertaining to how so many enviable elements could coalesce into such a ho-hum whole. It’s certainly not the premise, a queer noir set in modern Bakersfield, California which sees Margaret Qualley traipsing around a destitute section of the golden state with piss, vinegar, and a slew of winsome pantsuits. She plays Honey O’Donahue, a local private investigator whose life of outing adulterers and bedding every woman in sight is thrown into chaos by an interconnected crime spree. A glowing neon sign points toward the local church, headlined by pastor-cum-creep Drew Devlin (Chris Evans), but as any proper detective knows, the obvious lead isn’t always the one worth pursuing. Rather than questioning the townspeople, Honey’s time might be better utilized interrogating her own screenplay.

Expecting all the dots to connect in a seedy murder mystery is often a fool’s gambit, but co-writers Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke plop them down so haphazardly that true north is hard to come by. The duo’s previous effort, Drive-Away Dolls, was actually bolstered by its devil-may-care attitude toward narrative, but a simple chase movie is better suited for free-wheeling messiness. The inherent charm of playing things fast and loose is dimmed by the need to follow a yarn, one that keeps asking for your full attention despite refusing to settle down and focus on the task at hand. The wider Coen overture has always employed kooky diversions as an essential spice, but managed to keep its head down when matters of nuts-and-bolts dramaturgy needed to take precedence. This one can’t sit still.

Or perhaps it just has different priorities, with its central puzzle ever in service of its homoerotic interests. Positioned as the second chapter in Coen and Cooke’s planned “lesbian B-movie trilogy,” Honey feels most alive while twisting the politics of representation in tawdry, horny directions, both playful and committed in its sex scenes and broader sensuality. This brand of steaminess is its own reward, happily meeting queer moviegoers at their underserved level, but it also functions as a finger in the eye of those made queasy by such jubilantly explicit content, turning them into the butt of a running joke. A mid-movie shot of two lovers, laid out in post-coital bliss, is framed in a manner that goades the wandering eye, presenting what could only be described as a confrontational nipple. It’s mostly innocuous, given that the prospective offended parties are likely to skip this one in the first place, but that doesn’t stop the audience from directing a mischievous chuckle at the blushing straw man of their combative imagination. 

He takes quite a few body blows throughout Honey’s brisk 89 minute runtime, nearly all of which treat men as dangerous, boorish, or, most endearingly, pointless altogether. Flitting around the margins in search of progress to impede, the lesser gender pulls double duty as a punch line and a cautionary tale, with absentee fathers serving as an adhesive in a story that’s otherwise at risk of unraveling at the seams. When Qualley refers to a feckless cop played by Charlie Day as ‘her favorite man,’ it’s clear that his ranking has more to do with comparison than accomplishment. With the alternatives comprised of violent dead beats and predatory clergymen, it’s hard to find fault in her assessment. 

Evans wears this slime like a second skin, but there’s something discouraging about watching the erstwhile Steve Rodgers invert his boy scout routine in such a familiar manner. While his turns in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Knives Out benefitted from their juxtaposition against his Marvel work, it’s worth wondering if he’s up for anything stationed between the two polarities. Qualley, who was wildly over-the-top in Dolls, seems to be searching for that middle ground, and though her effortless charisma goes an awfully long way, there’s a lingering feeling that she’s working overtime to tamp down the theatrics. You could make a coffee table book out of the one-liners she gets off, but the space between the zingers is vacuous, placing the lion’s share of character shading right at the thespian’s feet. It’s a tall task, especially in a flick whose deadpan schtick doesn’t allow for much in the way of histrionics.

That dryness extends to the visuals and pacing, and while they’re effective in conveying small town doldrums, all that point-and-shot proficiency leaves something to be desired. The psychedelic interstitials that gave Dolls an extra pop wouldn’t have a home here, but that movie’s zany apparatus was ideal for its frequent optical nods to The Big Lebowski. This one’s analog in the Coen canon is Blood Simple, a gorgeous, dire outing with an aversion to all of Honey’s tomfoolery, ensuring that the contents and their delivery system go together like oil and water. None of the violence, gory as it may be, comes from the chest, the product of a flick that can’t decide if it’s more compelled to refute or champion its own storied lineage.

Living up to a lofty family name is no walk in the park, and that’s probably as close as we’ll get to understanding why Honey Don’t! can’t do right by its tasty ingredients. Escaping the shadow of Fargo and No Country for Old Men is not for the faint of heart, and retreating to its darkened confines only makes matters worse. Dolls’ decision to throw open the shudders made for a tossed-off good time at the pictures, creating a trickle down effect where its follow-up’s slight retrenchment reads as dispiriting return to basics. Grading any new offering solely against its esteemed doppelgängers is regrettably lazy, but it’s the best we’ve got under the circumstances. When it comes to legendary filmmakers with great material arriving at a perfectly fine, somewhat inert result, the baseline problem is anyone’s guess.