Last year’s Drive Away Dolls left many a bit perplexed. When Ethan’s brother-half Joel went on to solo direct The Tragedy of MacBeth as a serious F.W. Muranau-inspired black-and-white adaptation, his keen eye paired with Bruno Delbonnel still managed to cast a visual spell, whether or not the material felt justified for that interpretation. That was still clearly the work of someone who had been directing after a long career. With Drive Away Dolls, Ethan stripped everything back to make a film that felt almost like what would have been his directorial debut if he was born a young millennial. The results were occasionally fun, though unfortunately, a mixed bag with much of the raunchy humor feeling a bit childish and a young cast that felt awkwardly assembled. Despite that, Coen and his wife and writing-partner Tricia Cooke must have felt something very special with Margaret Qualley, whose North Carolina-Southern roots allow her to perfectly tap into the same dialogue rhythm as a young Holly Hunter.

Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, a private investigator from Bakersfield, California, who arrives at the scene of horrible automobile accident, discovering that the victim, a woman named Mia Novoty, is a familiar face to her, someone who came to her for help. Novoty was connected to the Four-Way Temple church, led by Reverend Drew Devlin (Chris Evans). Secretly a scumbag drug trafficker, despite his movie star smile and invigorating sermons he delivers to his passionate congregation, Devlin’s operation threatens to be blown after a tangled web of deaths are caused by his incompetent crew. Honey, herself, is stuck in her own tangled web. Despite the near-daily attempts by homicide detective Marty Metakawich (Charlie Day) to woo her, Honey is a proud lesbian who, while trailing through her investigation of the events, ends up in a sexually-charged entanglement with police officer MG Falcone (Aubrey Plaza), someone who is able to slip her information whenever she can get it. Honey also has a sister named Heidi (Kristen Connelly), whose daughter (of many, many children) Corrine (Talia Ryder) is dealing with an abusive boyfriend and recently being stalked by a homeless man who shows up to the fast food restaurant she works at. Honey also has a complicated relationship with her father, a past she is trying to move on from.

The amount of plot beats may start to feel aimless after a while, though the Coens are no strangers to aimlessness. Often getting by on quirky situations over simplistic plot structure, there is a lazy charm to just being able to soak in a film’s environment. The brilliant production design of Honey, Don’t luxuriates in a nostalgic fusion of past and present. Bakersfield appears to be a city that hasn’t changed since the early 1980s, with everyone driving vintage cars, listening to older tunes. Honey’s wood-paneled office includes a landline and a rolodex. Yet, the occasional smart phone or MAGA sticker will remind you that this is not a period piece. Perhaps this is just the way Honey sees the world, we are just looking at it through her preferred lens, a private eye lost in a bygone era.

Both of Ethan’s solo films were pitched as lesbian-led B-Movies, with a third film on the way to cap the themed-trilogy. Where Drive Away Dolls felt like a rusty attempt, Honey Don’t feels far more accomplished in tapping into that DNA. It even better employs the absurdist black humor and shocking, bloody darkness that the Coens are known for. Ari Wagner’s photography, while still lacking the textures of a Deakins or Delbonnel, still evokes a sun-soaked dreamscape and finds clever ways to juice up even the most simple exchanges (sunlight reflecting on a woman’s sunglasses that causes her to appear as though her eyes are glowing, an over-the-shoulder comedically obscuring a nude Chris Evans) and visually-inventive match-cut scene transitions.

Where Honey, Don’t still struggles greatly is its writing and casting. Clever zingers are layered all over the place, but no single memorable line sticks. The finale, while outrageously violent, feels slapped together as though the plot ran out of enough gas to keep going. The cast around Qualley, who herself is fantastic and makes Honey a surprisingly compelling lead, do what they can to make their parts work, but they still lack the more captivating presence of a usual Coens cast. Billy Eichner and Charlie Day are just no Richard Kind or Stephen Root. Evans has fun, and lands a couple laughs, but is tuned so far up it almost feels exhausting. Perhaps this is the issue with Evans who appears to be working lately in only two modes (charming sweetheart lead or brash asshole). Ideally, Evans would be best in the Coens world as a Brad Pitt-as-Chad Feldheimer himbo, whereas his villain era, a stark contrast to his long-running role in the Marvel universe, seems now to just be hitting one-note repetition.

As flawed as this lesbian B-movie trilogy seems to be, and as much as the brothers need to finally reunite, there is improvement here and enough charm to see what Coen and Cooke were trying for. It’s a more confident film, less reliant on big cameos from Matt Damon, Pedro Pascal, and Miley Cyrus, or more able to coast on its sunny Central Valley environment, humor, and raucous sex appeal. The use of sex, in particular, leans hard into that “exploitation film” feel far more assuredly and more maturely than Drive Away Dolls. Whereas that film felt like a fan of Raising Arizona, wanting to make their own version of that tone and only capturing a fifth of that movie’s charm, Honey, Don’t exists more in the languid vein of The Big Lebowski, with the black comedy violence of Burn After Reading, and captures a fourth. Perhaps, we can give Ethan and Tricia one more shot. But maybe just one more.