When Joel and Ethan Coen made it clear that they were each going solo for their most recent projects, there was some understandable concern among film fans. After making 17 feature-length projects together (or more, depending on how you count anthologies and other works), including four Oscars each, why the change? The two haven’t spoken much about the decision on the record, but on the podcast The Score, Joel simply attributed it to Ethan losing his taste for moviemaking for a while.

Joel’s solo directorial work, a German-Expressionist-tinged adaptation of Macbeth, wowed critics in 2021, but Ethan’s taken a bit more time off. His latest, Drive-Away Dolls, just opened this past weekend. Compared to The Tragedy of Macbeth, it’s far more familiar as a Coen film: a character-driven, kooky comedy, it’s billed as a first entry in a trilogy of “lesbian B-movies” Ethan is writing alongside his wife, Tricia Cooke.

Unfortunately, a rough similarity to previous Coen movies is about all Drive-Away Dolls has going for it. Time and again, the movie provoked more “Huh?” and “What?” moments than laughs. The movie seems like it’s referencing a genre or influence that isn’t quite clear, leaving you wondering if you’re missing some important context. While individual scenes feel like they might work as short films or comedy sketches in their own rights, they never come together as a satisfying whole.

The movie opens in 1999 with a pulpy set-up: Pedro Pascal, in a slick European outfit, is waiting in a grungy restaurant late one night with a briefcase. When he realizes that the person he’s meeting won’t show, he flees to a nearby alleyway, only to be attacked and have the briefcase stolen. The action then swings (almost literally, with a showy transition) to our leads: Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan), two friends with vastly different personalities. Jamie is uninhibited and apparently unemployed, while Marian is tightly wound and working in a dreary office. Both women want a change in their lives: Jamie needs to get away from a bad breakup with her girlfriend, Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), while Marian wants to move to Florida to shake herself out of a rut.

Even though neither woman really understands the other, they agree to take a drive-away car to Tallahassee, not knowing that the goons from the opening of the film have stashed the mysterious briefcase in the trunk. The villains give chase, all while Jamie and Marian grow closer the more time they spend together.

It’s hard to root for the leads, though, when they come across so cartoonishly and implausibly. Qualley’s Texas accent and unmoored character feel better suited to a Saturday Night Live sketch, while Viswanathan isn’t given much more to work with, other than the fact that her character doesn’t know how to connect with people. When they eventually become a couple, it’s not clear how it happened. The characters don’t learn from each other or develop internally. What’s worse is that Qualley and Viswanathan have zero chemistry, and their characters’ first night together conveys so little passion that I began to wonder if Marian was being exploited.

As for the villains, they’re positioned as well-organized and well-funded, but ultimately ineffective. They don’t catch up with Jamie and Marian until the end of the story, and the women don’t even know they’re being pursued until about an hour into the 84-minute movie. As a result, there’s not much of an external threat to the characters, which only highlights how little Jamie and Marian have in common.

The movie is stitched together with obvious, almost amateurish scene transitions that sap the story of forward momentum, including psychedelic interludes that give the film more of an anachronistic 60s or 70s vibe, despite being set in 1999. While these beats are eventually explained, it’s not clear why so much emphasis was placed on them in the context of the story. If Coen’s goal is to reference a variety of B-movie he’s familiar with, it doesn’t quite land. A filmmaker of his calibre can’t fake the intangible quality of an earnest, rough-around-the edges work by a Hollywood outsider. It leaves you puzzling over what, exactly, Coen was going for – a feeling that for the first time in a long while, we’re not in on the joke with a Coen film.

As a result, Drive-Away Dolls can only really be recommended to Coen Brothers completionists, or maybe to the small subset of people who love the cast and are lucky enough to click with the style Coen is pursuing. Anyone else can drive on by.

Drive-Away Dolls gets two stars out of four.

Stray thoughts

• Bill Camp as Curlie the drive-away dealer got the most laughs from me.

• I’d never even heard of the concept of a drive-away car before seeing this movie.

• It’s nice to see that Ethan Coen can still get some A-list cameos in a movie like this.