Honey Don't! is a sweaty and sleazy picture in all the wrong ways. It's the second part in Ethan Coen's and Tricia Cooke's planned "lesbian B-movie trilogy", yet has so little to say or make of itself I can't help but wonder who will be on the lookout for a third one.

It's thanks to the luminous Margaret Qualley that any of this works for even a minute. She plays Honey O'Donahue, the titular Honey who shouldn't, a fast-talking, hard-drinking, sexually-always-at-11 private eye stuck in a town of folks all half as smart as her. The part itself is an underwritten caricature, but you wouldn't know it thanks to Qualley, who makes a meal out of every scene. In another life, she'd have made an excellent heroine in 50s B-pictures.

Yet this is Spillane by the way of Russ Meyer, and like the latter, Honey Don't can't escape the fact that half its writing and directing team is a heterosexual dude. For a lesbian b-picture, there's an awful lot of male gaze leeriness to it all, especially in the numerous sex scenes. Yes, they're superficially intended as empowering. No, they don't come off that way. Instead, they hit all the beats of cheap titillation at the drive-in, which is another kind of genre altogether.

It would help if there were any kind of meat on the bones of the picture, yet Honey Don't! is so aimless and slight it feels like a TV pilot rather than a feature film. By the time it's over, I expected a "coming up later in the season" teaser to roll before the credits.

The story is a mishmash of ideas, none of which really go anywhere. Honey investigates a dead woman who was supposed to become a client. A desperate man thinks his partner is cheating on him. Chris Evans plays a sleazy clergyman who operates a drug running business with unseen French gangsters. A hit-woman is in town to clean up. Honey's sister's daughter goes missing. Honey's father returns into her life without warning. The taciturn MG (Aubrey Plaza) may or may not be into Honey.

At 90 minutes, none of these story lines get a moment to breathe. Instead, Honey wanders from one zany scenario to another, while things happens in the background without her anyway. This madcap style worked for the Coen's benefit in previous films, often highlighting the farcical nature of tragedy. Yet without the other half of the Coen Brothers, Ethan's detective slapstick feels adrift. As if it's missing a key component that gave the others their humanity. Now, it's just pratfalls with the occasional pair of breasts thrown in.

It's a frustratingly wasted effort, since Qualley, Plaza, and a decidedly game Charlie Day (playing a delightfully nonplussed detective) feel right at home in this insanity. Qualley and Plaza share an easy chemistry, even if their romance is more driven by the filmmaker's desire to see them get hot and heavy than anything even remotely believable.

Sadly, it's Evans who gets the shortest end of the stick. His cult leader caricature is so removed from the rest of the film that Evans ends up hamming the part up to such a degree it feels like pantomime. He can be a nuanced and effective actor when rightly utilized, but that's not the case here.

As Honey Don't! started, the midnight audience at Cannes was all in for the ride. Every production company logo got a cheer. Every cast member was met with wild applause. Each of the 1000+ people seated for the film were there for the picture, no questions asked.

When the credits rolled, there was a smattering of muted applause and a hurried rush for the exit. The previous 90 minutes had drained all energy out of a crowd that wanted this to be a winner.