Review: Honey Don't!

Hitting our shores on a wave of mixed reviews out of the USA, Honey Don't! is the kind of film that definitely has problems if you're looking for them. It also has a fair bit going for it if you're willing to meet it at its own level - which, to be clear, is a pretty shallow level. But when it's a film about a lesbian PI investigating a case packed with wacky types you weren't seriously expecting "deep".

Honey O'Donohue (Margaret Qualley) is a love 'em and leave 'em California small town private investigator who feels bad that she never got back to a client in trouble before she (the client) died in a fairly suspicious car crash. So she decides to dig around, and uncovers a string of over-the-top types vaguely linked to a local preacher (Chris Evans) running a church that's big on bringing people to the lord via sex (with him).

Movies about private investigators have a long and proud tradition of not really making much sense. This barely hangs together, even when it throws in a few twists - Honey's niece (Talia Ryder) goes missing (or does she?), Honey strikes up a relationship with one cop (Aubrey Plaza) while brushing off another one (Charlie Day) - but eventually there's an answer of sorts.

This is a film where getting there is pretty much all the fun. A striking Qualley is largely the (not-so) straight man to a bunch of comedy types who are all playing it very broad but rarely stick around long enough to get annoying. Neither does the film at barely 90 minutes - big thanks to co-writer / director Ethan Coen (working with his wife Tricia Cooke) there. 

Oh yeah, it's directed by one half of the Coen brothers. If you're someone who's been worshipping the ground they walk on for the last few decades then a): good work forgetting films like The Ladykillers and Intolerable Cruelty, and b): this probably feels like a pale reflection of past glories. 

While it's true this is operating in a register the Coens made their own without ever reaching the heights of their best work, that doesn't make it a failure. Again, it definitely has flaws. For one, Honey is surrounded by over-acting, which sometimes makes it hard to figure out which deaths are tragic and which ones are more like "guess that just happened".

For another, the plot never comes together to resolve much of anything, which possibly is intentional. Again, often the problem is tonal; some elements are built up but turn out to only be there so something else can happen, while more than once an inevitable development is either ignored or skipped over.

But Honey Don't! is a decent small town noir investing heavily in the idea that a bunch of steamy lesbian sex - or ogling, or even just banter - can make up for its flaws. Better films have skated by on less.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: Relay

Sneaking in under the radar, Relay is the kind of small scale, procedure-based thriller that rarely makes it to the big screen these days. Which is a shame; it'd be nice to think there was room in cinemas for something more than big budget franchises and horror movies, even as the box office constantly says otherwise.

The premise is straightforward: if you are a whistleblower who changes your mind - you want to give the incriminating evidence back to the evil corporation and just get on with your life - then Ash (Riz Ahmed) is the intermediary who will keep you safe and handle the delicate negotiations. Not face to face, of course, as a big part of this movie is about laying out the extreme levels of secrecy he applies to his operations. 

For one, "relay" refers to the fact that all his phone calls go through an untraceable phone relay service for the deaf. They're not allowed to record or monitor the calls in any way shape or form, and he never has to speak - he types in the words, the relay service has someone speak them to the person on the other end. And his secrecy doesn't stop there.

This, we rapidly realise, is a good thing. His latest case involves a scientist (Lily James) who has changed her mind about spilling the beans regarding a dodgy strain of wheat. Only she's already being targeted by a squad led by Dawson (Sam Worthington), who want the info back and don't trust Ash in the slightest. 

What follows is a game of cat and mouse (think a low tech version of one of the good Jason Bourne movies) as Ash runs everyone ragged to put all the pieces in place without being identified, while Dawson and his team are constantly drawing ever closer to tearing off his (proverbial) mask.

There is slightly more going on here, but it's also the one area where the film isn't quite as smart as it thinks it is. Fortunately, the whole thing works as a procedural no matter what, and it's more a matter of how the tension is released (either all at once or over a longer period) than the film relying on a big reveal to work.

Out of the three main characters Worthington is clearly having fun as a stock standard highly competent badass, while Ahmed gets to slowly open up in a journey that's constantly engaging even if what's revealed is somewhat predictable. James as a fairly generic damsel in distress is possibly the least interesting of the three, though a close study of her character does reveal a few layers that spice things up a little as her bond with Ash grows.

Satisfying more as a step-by-step look at a bunch of smart people trying to outsmart each other than as a high octane thrill-ride, Relay is the kind of espionage drama that'll always find a receptive audience. Whether that audience is in cinemas or streaming remains to be seen: there's still time for audiences to have their say.

- Anthony Morris 

 

Review: The Naked Gun

The problem with making a comedy that's more than "merely" a comedy is that pretty much anything is easier to do than comedy. Once you start down the path of making a comedy only, you know, the dramatic scenes are treated seriously, it's not long before you've got a half baked drama with a few limp gags scattered throughout. It takes creatives who take comedy seriously to make a film that's just trying to be funny from start to finish, which brings us to The Naked Gun.

A sequel of sorts to a much-loved and very silly 80s comedy franchise that's currently seen as a high water mark of a genre nobody really misses, this particular do-over has been a while coming. So much so that it initially was surfing a completely different wave, in the form of the brief feature-length comedy renaissance of Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, whose success with talking teddy bear movie Ted briefly had him as the saviour of big screen comedy.

Fortunately it took so long to put the puzzle pieces together that MacFarlane himself stepped back to merely produce, and while Liam Neeson (who'd worked with MacFarlane) stuck around as Frank Drebin Jr, new director Akiva Schaffer (Hot Rod) brought in his own writers to create this particular 85-odd minutes of non-stop comedy wrapped around a loose parody of police mysteries and action drama.

And "non-stop" is no exaggeration: that previously mentioned genre that nobody misses is the one where the jokes come thick, fast, and in pretty much every form available. In early examples like Airplane! (Flying High! in Australia), Top Secret! and The Naked Gun, the mix of genre parody and whatever the creative team thought would get a laugh often struck comedy gold; by 2008's Meet The Spartans, nobody was having much of a good time.

The Naked Gun (2025) works mostly because the jokes are funny, both in isolation and taken together. They're usually so silly they'd float away if not for the weight of the gruff performance from Neeson and the... not exactly gravitas or sense of legacy, but in that ballpark... that the original Naked Gun has gained over the years. 

Forty years on, the original is seen as a real movie. It's something to live up to, and the fact this clearly tries to do so - even if the way it tries is through a lot of stupid-smart jokes - makes it feel like a real movie in a way that, say, most of Adam Sandler's efforts for Netflix do not.

So jokes so stupid they come out the other side and seem almost smart: this has plenty of them. Not all of them work, and sometimes you can see where the jokes that didn't work were cut, but mostly this gets the laughs it goes for - and it goes for a lot. Pamela Anderson is the surprise MVP here, and it turns out two leads who are good at playing it serious in a crazy world are all you need.

The Naked Gun knows where it's going and it does everything it can to make sure it gets there; would that more of Hollywood's more serious products could manage that.

- Anthony Morris 

Review: Weapons

More than a lot of other genres, horror movies don't want you to look back. The point is to scare you in the moment; if that means that later on you realise the scare didn't really make sense, well, here's a new scare, don't think about this one too much either.

Weapons is a story told via a number of characters whose paths overlap. Over the course of their stories, the pace slowly but steadily ramps up: the first couple of chapters (it's broken into a series of roughly 20-minute segments, each open opening with the name of the character we'll be following) take place over days, then hours, with the final one pretty much running in real time.

So as the bigger picture becomes clear, there's less time to take it all in. Which on one level makes this a lot of fun to watch; the stakes get higher, the tension builds, characters are rushing towards situations they don't understand - and we barely know more than they do, just that they're heading into worse trouble than they realise - and the whole thing reaches a crescendo that's both extremely satisfying and pretty ghastly if you think about it.

As for what it's actually about, beyond the basic set up - in small town USA, at 2.17am, seventeen primary schoolkids from the same class got up, ran out of their homes, and vanished - the less you know the better. 

The community is outraged, with much of their ire falling on the children's teacher (Julia Garner), who has a few personal flaws of her own. Distraught father Archer (Josh Brolin) is conducting his own investigation, while inept cop Paul (Aiden Ehrenreich), local junkie James (Austin Abrams), and the only child from the class who didn't vanish (Cary Christopher) and his great-aunt (Amy Madigan) also come into focus.

There's a lot of possible touchstones here. Small town, young children gives a Stranger Things vibe; throw in the big cast and the overlapping chapters and there's echos of Stephen King. Likewise, early on this is happy to feint in a lot of directions as far as possible meanings; mob violence, a metaphor for school shootings, American citizens desperate to latch onto any explanation for the horrors around them. Take your pick.

Even the distinctive arms out run of the missing children has multiple possible meanings, from historical images to kids pretending to be aeroplanes, but writer/ director Zach Cregger is much more interested in making gestures than building anything solid out of them. It's a film of surfaces, gesturing towards deeper meanings then discarding them.

What really matters here isn't so much the explanation (though there is one) as the journey. There's plenty of scares and a growing sense of unease; there's also a surprising amount of comedy, both to relieve the tension and because some of what's going on really is legitimately funny. 

Weapons is a twisty, satisfyingly startling ride that relentlessly pushes you onward - and if later on you're left thinking "hang on a second", you'll probably be too worried about what's behind you in the back seat of your car to look back.

- Anthony Morris