Honey, you do whatever the heck you want: you're
an American with a gun
dir: Ethan Coen
2025
Lesbians. Tricia Cooke has made two movies, and they’ve mostly been about how much fun it is to be a lesbian. Oh I know it says the director is Ethan Coen, but everyone knows it’s Tricia pulling the lesbian strings.
Otherwise it looks very strange as to why a middle-aged cis het man is making so many movies with them as the main characters.
Although I will point out that none of the actors playing these lesbians identifies as gay or lesbian, but then they’re also not private detectives, cops or murderers in real life either, so I guess it’s all staying true to acting being a curiously expensive form of playing make believe.
There have been oodles of other plot elements in these two films of a threatened lesbian detective trilogy of films, but like the Maltese Falcon in The Maltese Falcon, and the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, it doesn’t really matter what the special item people are after is, what matters is whether the lesbians have sex on screen in a convincing manner.
No, it’s not that either. It’s all about the banter.
Both of these films have starred Margaret Qualley in the lead role. Now, when I first saw Drive Away Dolls, I hadn’t seen Margaret Qualley in anything as yet, and didn’t think that much of her abilities as an actor. Since then I have seen her in at least 3000 movies, and now, watching her in this, I have a far greater appreciation for her qualities as an actor.
She plays this role “straight”, as in, like she’s a detective in a 1970s flick, even if it’s set contemporarily, but she’s not hamming it up for the camera. Everyone else acts like they’re in a comedic crime caper, but she’s dedicated to her deadpan role.
She’s so dedicated to deadpan that when they bring Aubrey Plaza into the story, Qualley out-deadpans her, which is no minor achievement.
Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, a private investigator investigating the death of a woman who wasn’t even her client. She was going to meet with her and potentially be a client, but then she died in a car crash. She doesn’t know it but it was organised by a cutesy mod looking French murderer (Lera Abova, who is about as French as I am). I’m sure she had her reasons.
Honey spends the rest of the flick tangentially investigating what might have happened, as a whole bunch of stuff happens that she never sees and mostly never finds out about, as she wanders around having sex with every woman that she can.
What’s wrong with that? Who complained when the legendary detectives swanned around swilling whisky smoking cigarettes and sexing up every blonde, brunette and redhead within a hundred mile radius of some maguffin? Men didn’t complain. Women eventually started saying “this wish-fulfilment bullshit is pretty sexist”, but the men didn’t listen. They just kept ploughing ahead, grimly doing what they were doing.
And look at them now, recording videos of themselves expressing how much they hate Greta Thunberg or Grace Tame as they sit in their basements or in their pick-up trucks / utes wondering why their kids never call them or visit…
Ah well. This flick clearly is taking the piss out of the detective genre, and hooray for that, because it’s a genre that desperately needs the piss taken out of it.
Also coming in for a serve is religion. Who knew that religious types could be murderous hypocrites? Continuing his run of playing loathsome arseholes in flicks like this or the Knives Out movies, America’s Ass Chris Evans plays a reverend who tends to his flock at the Four Way Church a little too attentively. But even worse than his exploitation of his congregation’s vulnerabilities, well, actually, it really isn’t worse because the level of betrayal is staggeringly awful, he’s also moving product through the church, and that means lots of murders to keep people in line.
The woman from the beginning of the movie had some connection to the church, so that’s Honey’s chance to link everything together and wrap it all up with a neat, perfect bow.
That’s fortunately not what happens. There is a lot of meandering along the way, and no clear destination, even though we think there will be. Mostly, everything that happens is meant to be a showcase for Honey to make quips and appropriate facial expressions. She does facial expressions hard in this flick. You are left with no quibbles as to what her thinking is at any time.
Amidst all the investigations and general fuckery, she even finds time to pursue perhaps a relationship with another lesbian as heartless and casual as she is, even more so if possible. Aubrey Plaza plays a cop called MG, but she doesn’t entirely play it the way one might expect her to. She’s not laid back and sarcastic, as in her most famous roles, but she is kind of mean and cold, which makes a lot more sense towards the end of the film.
Also, there’s like this New Jersey / Staten Island accent she’s trying out? It’s interesting!
Like all of these stories, whether it’s a heist gone wrong / meeting of scoundrels in a Tarantino film, or the whereabouts of The Dude’s rug / Bunny Lebowski’s pinky toe in The Big Lebowski, there are a hell of a lot of coincidences to make the plot jitterbug along and reach some kind of (lazy) resolution, but I actually think the way that Honey, though very perceptive, doesn’t really solve anything or help in the comeuppance of what we thought were the main baddies, but does still do some good when she inadvertently saves her deeply dumb niece from a fate she couldn’t have anticipated, and also violently threatens the white trash abusive boyfriend as well, is highly enjoyable.
Qualley easily shoulders the burden of carrying a shaggy dog flick like this, and it’s good to see her maturing into a lead actor. Everyone else in this is a cheesy, slightly cartoonish delight. There’s a few scenes that devolve into horrific violence that is the thing people used to blame Tarantino’s movies for, as in things that go comically wrong and result in people biting the big one in horrific fashions, but that blame can just as easily be laid at the feet of the Coen Brothers as well, and since one of them is on hand to help Tricia achieve her vision (of a lesbian paradise), we know who to blame.
There’s a drug deal gone wrong in a parking lot that goes so wrong I still cringe remembering it, and then there’s the attempt to silence a lowly worker in the drug / church empire that results in someone’s poor abuela being viciously murdered that keeps escalating and escalating.
That’s taking things too far. You murder someone’s abuela like that; that’s not cool. Abuelas, if Dora the Explorer taught us nothing else from all her years of, um, exploring, should be entirely off limits when it comes to comedies, ‘black’ or otherwise.
I don’t know if it was all filmed in Bakersfield, California, but it’s set there at least, and what an empty, squalid, dust covered place it seems to be. It’s like a used car dealership stretched out to city size. Don’t want to ever pass through, don’t ever want to visit, thanks, especially not their churches, ew.
It’s not astounding, but it’s not terrible either, especially if you enjoy watching women pretend to be lesbians (or at least seem to enjoy it a little bit too much, as if they’re thinking hmm, maybe…?) and solve crimes, but not in that order.
Who knows what Margaret Qualley will do in the next one? Hopefully not a Southern accent again, but could be anything, as long as it delights / amuses Tricia Cooke.
7 times it’s always nice to give your ‘marital aids’ a good wash in the dishwasher after a big night out of 10
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“Why not open yourself up, see what happens? You got nothing to lose but your fears.”
- “ Thanks, I'll stick with my dildo. It helps me open myself and it doesn't have a creep attached.’ – ouch, you’ve been told - Honey Don’t
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