Three cheers for Peggy Schnitzer’s fabulous costumes. They almost endow Margaret Qualley’s blank and tiresome gumshoe heroine – the Honey of the title – with some personality. The second instalment of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s unwanted lesbian B-movie trilogy casts Qualley’s deadpan private investigator in a meandering venture into a low-rent religious cult and multiple murders.
The iconography is present and correct. Honey O’Donahue zooms around Bakersfield, California, in a blue Camaro, typically on the trail of marital cheaters, until a suspicious car crash draws her into a deeper, messier mystery. As with last year’s Drive-Away Dolls, it’s an exercise in nothingness and insincerity. You can’t make a low-rent B-movie with A-list credentials and studio backing.
Somewhere along the way, Qualley, channelling a Marlboro ad in sardonic glances and drawn-out drawls, meets Aubrey Plaza’s MJ Falcone, a police evidence clerk and aloof lover. The two share a relationship more competitive than romantic, crackling with tension but never generating true heat.
Their sex scenes, choreographed and cheeky, are stylish set-pieces, never emotionally meaningful encounters.
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Chris Evans, meanwhile, returns to his comedic roots as Drew Devlin, a lecherous megachurch pastor-cum-cult-leader with a sex dungeon and a messiah complex. He’s clearly having a blast, but his underwritten scenes, like most of the film, feel like Saturday Night Live sketches in search of a narrative.
There’s even a barndoor-broad SNL moment in which a Maga bumper sticker is replaced with “I have a vagina and I vote”.
Nothing lands here. A potentially juicy thread involving a Vespa-riding French assassin and a covert drug operation fizzles out just as it starts to intrigue. A game supporting cast, including Charlie Day as a horny homicide detective and Gabby Beans as Honey’s wisecracking assistant, delivers punchlines. But the film’s self-aware, queered-up take on noir cliches ultimately amounts to nothing like momentum. Trashy stories need plots and character development, too.
In cinemas from Friday, September 6th
