The title of Ethan Coen’s leaden romp “Drive-Away Dolls” summons up the vulgar excesses of old-school exploitation cinema, with its horrors and pleasures, carnage and flesh. If only! The promising setup involves two friends — the inapt duo of Margaret Qualley as Jamie and Geraldine Viswanathan as Marian — who, during a 1999 road trip from Philadelphia to Florida, come into possession of a briefcase wanted by some bad, violent men. There will be blood, yup, if not enough to obscure the inert staging, D.O.A. jokes and overblown performances.
This is the most recent movie that Ethan Coen has made without his brother, Joel, his longtime collaborator. (Ethan also made the 2022 documentary “Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind.”) To a degree, “Drive-Away Dolls” seems of a piece with the Coens’ practice of playing with story forms (film genres and otherwise), which they have consistently satirized, upended and all but gutted. Mixing the ostensibly high with the putatively low, they sample and riff on populist and rarefied sources, the spiritual and the material. This can create a fascinating doubling in the sense that there’s the movie in front of you and its layered references, all of which can flow together when they don’t congeal, which alas happens here.
Written by Coen and his wife, Tricia Cooke, “Drive-Away Dolls” opens on an old-style neon bar sign spelling out the word “Cicero,” immediately suggesting that you’re in familiar Coen territory. This nod to the philosopher puts you on alert, but it also feels like bait for those aficionados eager to sift through signs and meanings (which can be a self-flattering exercise for filmmakers and for viewers). Soon enough, the camera is prowling inside the bar where a panicked-looking man (Pedro Pascal as the Collector) sits in a booth clutching a briefcase to his body. After exchanging words with a curiously hostile waiter, the Collector scurries down a shadowy Chandleresque mean street before taking a fatal turn into a nightmarish alley.
This particular briefcase contains another of moviedom’s great whatsits, one of those mysteries that, like knowledge itself, some people have, others are desperate to obtain and still others eventually regret having. After some character introductions — enter Jamie, Marian et. al. — and pro forma scene-setting, the movie gets down to business and the briefcase changes hands. For reasons that make sense mostly as a screenwriting contrivance, the two friends secure a car from a guy named Curlie (Bill Camp) and hit the road, with plans to visit Marian’s aunt in Tallahassee. There’s some sweet, sticky stuff, too: Jamie, who has broken up with her girlfriend, a tough cop named Sukie (Beanie Feldstein), thinks Marian needs to get laid. Marian does too, so there are more bars in their future.
