Honey Don't Review: Standout Cast Can't Save Disappointing Comedy

Ethan Coen takes a break from his usual directing partner (his brother Joel) with Honey Don't, a mystery/comedy with a star-studded cast.

Synopsis:

"Small-town private investigator Honey O'Donahue (Margaret Qualley) probes a series of strange deaths that are tied to a mysterious church."

Cast:

Margaret Qualley, Aubrey Plaza, Charlie Day, Chris Evans

Release Date:

In Theaters Now

All Around Exceptional Cast

Credit: Focus Features

The one redeeming quality for Honey Don't is the ensemble cast, especially Margaret Qualley in the lead role. I've been keeping a close eye on Qualley's career since her breakout role in The Substance last year, a role that I think deserved to get her a lot more awards love than she actually got. Nonetheless, most of the roles she's gotten at this point in her young career have been supporting or side characters. In this film she has her first true lead role and she absolutely crushes it. The character she plays is confident and a little bit crazy, two extremes that she succeeds in playing out on screen. Regardless of the film itself being a little uninteresting, I was still somewhat engaged throughout because of her as the lead. She's got great chemistry with this supporting cast of actors and all the best jokes in the movie came from her impressive line delivery. This was another great performance from her and I really hope she continues to get lead roles in the future.

As for the rest of the cast, it's filled with some small but very enjoyable performances, Aubrey Plaza comes into a rare film role and does the best with what she's given. Her chemistry in particular with Qualley can be really fun at points and just goes to a level of insanity in the climax of the movie. Chris Evans isn't asked to do anything serious acting wise here, but you can just tell he's having the absolute best time with his character. Same goes for Charlie Day, who is always great and got the most laughs out of my theater. My only negative from these three is that I would've liked to see more of them, but talking specifically about what we got, it was a really fun cast and did a lot of heavy lifting for this film in its weakest points.

Storylines All Over The Place

Credit: Focus Features

The biggest problem with Honey Don't is that it's just kind of a mess. They introduce a lot of different storylines and I don't think any of them were really executed in the best way. A lot of the connections between characters feel painfully orchestrated to move the plot forward and nothing that a gripping mystery should have. Regardless of how much this movie is trying to be both a comedy and mystery, the latter was completely left out to dry in favor of the humor. More on the humor later, but I came into this wanting to be intrigued by the mystery side of things and I wasn't really at all. There's many subplots that are brought in at random points in the story and don't really do anything to move any of our characters forward. Nne of these subplots or main storylines draw you in at any point and it leaves for an overall just boring watch outisde of the performances from the cast.

The pacing is also a real problem. Many of the scenes are really slow, missing music or some kind of snappy dialogue that asks the audience to stay interested in every word. With this film you really feel like the exact opposite - you could probably pay attention to about 5% of the dialogue and still not be confused by the end. It's also a really short film, which can be fine if the execution is right... but it isn't here. It weirdly felt like we were dropped into an episode of a long-running television show. The filmmakers act as if we know the backstory of all the characters and that this is just a simple day-in-the-life of Qualley's character. Maybe that would work for some, but it really threw me off.

Lack Of Character Development

Credit: Focus Features

Another victim of that short runtime would be any apparent character development for our main cast. Maybe it could be expected that Evans/Plaza/Day don't get much in depth exploration with their roles, but we really deserved to get a better look at Qualley's character throughout. From beginning to end we really don't know her motivations, backstory or anything that makes us invested in what's happening to her in the climax. It feels like they are beginning to explore some of her motivations in certain scenes, but it never really gets there. Honestly, maybe even 20-30 minutes of extra runtime could've helped improve this movie in this category. Especially when there's multiple scenes that linger way too long and don't really do anything for the final conclusion. Not only should it have been longer, but they should've done more with the runtime they had. Due to a lack of maximizing those scenes we did get, many of the characters suffer in terms of any kind of development.

Humor Didn't Work As It Should

Credit: Focus Features

Something that's very apparent early on in this movie is that they wanted to make this a comedy as much as they possibly could. You can get that vibe from the trailers and the cast they assembled, but you won't really feel it completely until you watch the actual film itself. The problem with this as a narrative choice is that the comedy doesn't really hit as much as they wanted it to. There were a couple laughs from me and my theater throughout, but clearly not as many as the filmmakers would expect. As I mentioned in some of the previous sections, there's many scenes that just linger painfully because it's attempting to get some laughs but is never really that humorous. When the humor is taking away from the already uninteresting mystery, it better at least work. However, I don't think the vibe they wanted was really executed in the correct way. Again, I wish they would have sacrificed some of the comedy for more serious moments or at least some interesting twists in the mystery.

Final Thoughts

I came into Honey Don't really excited because of the cast and the enjoyable trailers, but I left really disappointed. Outside of a really good lead in Qualley, the film fails to execute it's most pivotal aspects and doesn't leave you with anything of real substance. It's far from the worst film I've seen this year, but it's way closer to the bottom of my list than the middle.

Rating: 2/5 Stars

Honey Don't is currently ranked 48th out of 58 2025 new releases that I've seen this year.

Editor's Note: I've included the top 20 from my 2025 new releases list, for editing purposes.