‘Honey Don’t!’ more of a clumsy caper than a stylish whodunit

In 2024, married filmmakers Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke posed a cheeky question with their screwball caper “Drive-Away Dolls” — what if crime comedies could be way less masculine, and way more sapphic?

With a style and tone that could only be described as “late ’90s Tarantino rip-off,” that film was the kickoff of their lesbian B-movie trilogy starring Margaret Qualley, which Coen directs, Cooke edits and they both write.

The second installment, the Bakersfield, California-set neo-noir “Honey Don’t!,” continues this project, which is both personal for the pair (Cooke is a lesbian; they have an open marriage) and an opportunity to just have a little fun, riffing on tropes and stereotypes while playing in the world of the stylish whodunit, ribbing films like “Pulp Fiction” for a laugh (there are a couple of overt nods to Tarantino’s 1995 classic).

In “Honey Don’t!” Coen and Cooke set up quite the world of intrigue in dusty, sun-drenched Bakersfield, where Honey O’Donahue (Qualley) is the town’s retro-styled, private investigator. With her red-painted lips, hypnotic swagger and seductively low voice, Honey draws in suitors of all stripes and sensibilities despite her professed preference.

The character and Qualley’s performance is so beguiling that it would be a delight to watch Honey O’Donahue solve any manner of mysteries of the week, “Columbo”-style. It’s a shame, then, that the particular mystery at hand in “Honey Don’t!” is so convoluted and nonsensical.

Coen and Cooke’s script attempts to play sleight of hand, using elaborate misdirection to lead the audience down one very obvious path, before pulling the rug out to reveal a bizarre and random twist that isn’t satisfying in the least.

When a potential client ends up quite literally dead in a ditch after a car wreck, Honey starts to poke around. She ends up investigating a creepy megachurch led by a charismatic and corrupt preacher, Rev. Drew Devlin (Chris Evans, having too much fun), while managing a situation with her rebellious niece, Corinne (Talia Ryder), and her troublesome boyfriend (Alexander Carstoiu), and striking up a new relationship with MG (Aubrey Plaza), a gruff local cop. She’s also got a new client to placate, Mr. Siegfried (Billy Eichner).

Somehow all these disparate threads do weave together, but the seams show and it’s messy work.

Frequently, Coen and Cooke put the emphasis on sustained suspense sequences that are ancillary at best to the central storyline. There’s a section of several extremely violent scenes concerning the mishaps of Devlin’s drug dealers and henchmen that goes nowhere, plot-wise, and ultimately doesn’t serve the purpose of establishing the mood and vibe, either. For a film that’s under 90 minutes, there’s a lot of unnecessary flab that distracts from the central mystery without propelling the story.

Much like “Drive-Away Dolls,” the sex scenes in “Honey Don’t!” are frank, frequent and funny — or attempt to be. There’s nothing titillating about them, despite how energetically they’re performed by the actors.

Maybe “Honey Don’t!” needed more vibes and less plot, because the best part of the film is a montage in which Honey drives her vintage convertible around Bakersfield, searching for her niece, soundtracked to a terrific new Jack Antonoff song, featuring Qualley, his wife, on vocals.

It’s the best of what this film has to offer: the character, the setting, Qualley’s performance as a kind of latter-day Philip Marlowe from Robert Altman’s “The Long Goodbye.” Remember, though, that “The Long Goodbye” was mostly about mood anyway, Marlowe buying cat food, his quirky neighbors, the plot unfolding almost effortlessly underneath him.

In “Honey Don’t!” the plot feels so labored and forced, a great expenditure of narrative energy that just sort of evaporates.

Here’s hoping the third time’s the charm for Coen and Cooke’s trilogy, which so far has produced a pair of wildly uneven films.