Drive-away Dolls

I wanted to like this, really have never seen a Coen movie that wasn't good... until this one. It has some funny moments, no doubt, but they were pretty few and far between.

Possibly some of this flew over my head, as I'm not a member of the lesbian community, but again just not my thing.

I thought the criminals were fairly funny and the two leads had some moments, but I really wish we got more high quality comedies in this day and age. Too few and the ones that get here are usually meh.

If you want a good Coen brothers comedy, checkout burn after reading, it's hilarious. Really wish this was better, but it's way too uneven.

This maybe had 45-50 minutes worth of content and it made 84 minutes feel long. The script needed a lot of work and I'm shocked Ethan Coen released something this half baked.

There are a few moments of enjoyment but, they are few and far between. They went for a campy feel but I never found Qualley's performance convincing and Viswanathan came off more wooden than intended. The side characters had more funny moments and funny performances than the leads.

On the plus side, the last 10-15 minutes were thoroughly entertaining. It's like they had an ending in mind and worked backwards from there. It failed miserably to build something worthy of the idea and had some unintentional cringeworthy moments.

An Ethan Coen movie and I am a big fan of his earlier work with the Coen Brothers, but I never much liked their farcical comedies and this is yet another one out of that silly comedy genre...

The bad: it's not funny. I did not laugh once. THAT matters (to me), because supposedly this is a "comedy". But humour is quite personal, so perhaps others will be roaring with laughter?

More bad: It's not thrilling WHATSOEVER. Not for one eenie minie minute is it thrilling. THAT I can guarantee you without a doubf!

This looks more like a cheaply produced television or streaming movie than a real feature movie. It lasts only 1 hour and 17 minutes and still I got bored. (A leftover from the Corona era?)

What is it then? It's a (failed) silly "comedy". Without ANY true to life characters (AT ALL). Even in a farce like this the characters have to be sympathetic or at least have something going for them that one can relate to, but none of that. Such a pity...

I am really a big fan of actress Margaret Qualley. She absolutely shined in several other movies lately, but her performance in this movie is just too plain SILLY, SO much so that her SILLY performance really (!) irritated me from the very start. That's no good...

Perhaps only suited for the fans of the earlier (much better) farcical Coen Brother comedies (Brother where art thou for example)? BUT BEWARE: this is nowhere near as good, so you have been warned !!! (3 exlamation marks)

Drive Away Dolls is the latest film from Ethan Coen but the first without collaboration from brother Joel. While Joel whittled away with a stark, black and white adaptation of Macbeth starring an utterly joyless Denzel Washington, Ethan's film wouldn't feel out of place alongside a 70s B-movie double feature. Dolls is replete with cheesy transitions, awkward close-ups, obnoxious neon, vintage Coen accents, and a welcome-but-not-quite-good-enough use of Maggot Brain. It's also a mixed bag of indulgent violence, puritan degeneracy, and half-baked characterizations.

The film follows Jamie and Marian as they drive to Tallahassee, inadvertently picking up precious cargo belonging to a group of shady individuals who have killed to keep it in their possession. The film is an interesting but sometimes tedious clash of black crime farce and melodramatic lesbian dramedy, devoting infrequent time to either story for proper depth or development.

Positives first. The film is funny. Not always funny, not quite funny enough, and garishly lacking the type of transgressive abrasiveness to make the material shine...but in general, it's funny. Though the characters aren't drawn intricately, their details (both from the script and the performances) are emphasized and repeated to build adequate rapport with each other and the audience.

Dolls is also stylized, in a perplexingly cheap but modestly endearing sort of way. The gimmicky transitions and trippy, spacey moments help build vital momentum to keep the first half breezy and engaging. However, Coen's parlor tricks wane and drag when the plot thickens and the film must carry itself on the merits of its own internal logistics and validity. When that time comes, the Dolls implodes.

Again, Dolls is a grinding mishmash of crime comedy and lesbian dramedy, an interesting conceit which never works with itself to create unity or continuity. The stories of disparate, often as jarring and incongruent as the smash-cut transitions which hold them together like staples through skin. The material feels like a first draft or an untalented mockery of a Coens brothers' script. The heart, patience, and icily detached bemusement of their earlier work has been augmented into the dishearteningly ubiquitous trend of smug, self-righteously assured moral congratulation.

Every creative choice tugs and struggles against the others, but the real letdown of Dolls is its faux dedication to irreverence in its superior first half. When the plot kicks in, when our leads are finally given true agency in regards to the bigger picture, everything becomes easy.

What should be an elongated sequence of comedic tension and unpredictability quickly upends itself to give our intrepid little heroes the necessary resources for a clean, bland getaway. The tension deflates; the comedy deflates; the interest deflates; the irreverence inverts, praising Jamie and Marian as ideal ideological models. It's disappointing and honestly unexpected, but maybe Ethan's been watching South Park recently - in the end, he managed to make it gay and make it lame.

Overall, Drive Away Dolls is tough to criticize or praise too fervently because it's a film of halves. The first half is tonally breezy and characterizations (both heroes and villains) are striking but not overbearing. In the second, the tone and treatment of protagonists is eye-rolling. In the first half, the stakes are high, the style is laid back, and the journey is leisurely. In the second, the stakes are obliterated, the style is forced, and the journey feels like a ham-fisted means to an end. See it as a curious counterpoint to Joel's Macbeth, but don't go in expecting Fargo. 5/9.

After seeing the trailer to Drive Away Dolls, I was expecting a crime caper comedy, but I saw the movie and got something different and not in a good way.

This movie I felt was trying more to shock us then being funny. Had promise but got wasted on lazy storytelling, and two characters who are amusing but then quickly I was feeling smothered by. Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan are talented, and have good chemistry, but the problem is I wish they where better written, Qualley overacts and Viswanathan under acts. Other actors who I will not name come in and do very little here. This movie is a trainwreck.