This raucous, sometimes-very-funny new caper from Ethan Coen is a throwback Thelma and Louise with a sapphic twist. Written by Coen’s wife Tricia Cooke, the crime road movie – whose original title Drive Away Dykes was at some point reined in to Drive Away Dolls – features two odd-couple pals: Jamie, a garrulous, sexually voracious Texan played by Margaret Qualley, and the buttoned-up, bookish Marian, in a comic straight-man (no pun intended) part for Geraldine Viswanathan. The plot is simple – the two women, fed up with their hometown, set off on a road trip to Tallahassee, unwittingly renting a car that contains very sensitive – and valuable – materials. Soon, two bickering, hyper-violent thugs are on their tail, led by Colman Domingo in an enjoyable turn as an elegantly sinister fixer. The film is set in the 90s for good reason – not only is this Thelma & Louise, but it’s also a bit of Pulp Fiction , with its two protagonists left in a diner at one point with an enigmatic attaché case. Its filthy humour, however, full of cunnilingus and dildo jokes, is unlike either of those films. It makes Drive Away Dolls good fun to watch, but it is incredibly lightweight stuff. Not all of the jokes land, celebrity cameos – save for one gem from
Matt Damon as a conservative
Florida senator that brought audible delight to the audience I saw it with – give off the vague sense of a feature-length
SNL skit, and the characters feel sketched on the back of a napkin. The only depth we see is one punchline flashback to Marian in a moment of childhood lesbian voyeurism, while the budding romance has no spark, in spite of valiant attempts from the lively Qualley. Both
Women are doing their damnedest and their likeability holds the film together, even as it descends into weird sub-Tarantino territory and uses showy, irritating transitions between scenes in a peculiarly amateurish way. Read Next The 11 biggest moments of the 2024
Oscars As for the Coen Brothers , it’s fascinating to see the split between these two famous brother-auteurs and the projects they have pursued individually. While Joel has gone in a serious direction with the likes of The Tragedy of Macbeth , here Ethan has gone all-in on the screwball, noir, and road movie traditions of
American cinema past. Updated with a female, queer-centric twist and making a joke of the (literal) dick-measuring men more common to the genre, Drive Away Dolls gets some mileage out of trying to subvert expectations. But it does make me wonder if it was the pair’s yin-yang quality that made their work together so brilliant, and what richness this movie is missing as a result.