Drive-Away Dolls review: This yellow-pack comedy from Ethan Coen raises the question ‘Oh brother, where art thou?’

We wish Ethan Coen well. Of course we do. As half of the Coen brothers he has brought us much joy over the past 40 years. We hope life treats Tricia Cooke just as kindly. Ethan’s wife, long an editor of the siblings’ films, here collaborates on a (sadly, no other adjective will suffice) zany comedy that sends two lesbian pals spinning across the United States in the last days of the Clinton administration. There is an early decapitation. There is a mysterious metallic suitcase. There is a shot taken from the inside of a car boot.

As you won’t now need to be told, Drive-Away Dolls dwells in similar territory to all those wearisome comedy thrillers that riffed on Tarantino and the Coens through the late 1990s. Setting the film in the last year of the 20th century only presses home unhappy reminders of 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag, Very Bad Things and Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead. “But this is the real thing”, I hear you yell. “Surely a Coen and a Coen regular wouldn’t deal in rip-offs of themselves.” You’d think. No good will can wholly brush away the ersatz hokeyness of this venture. It’s as if The Beatles managed to release a record by Herman’s Hermits.

Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan play the contrasting pals Jamie and Marian. Early on they visit a drive-away car service and agree to take a vehicle from Philadelphia to Tallahassee, but, unbeknown to them, that mysterious case has been secreted in the boot. Soon a gang of comedy goons is on their trail.

What follows, from a script by Coen and Cooke, thinks itself to be an enormous amount of fun. The violence is slapstick. The dialogue is quippy. The sex is moderately explicit but, alas, is largely played for laughs. There is, indeed, a whiff of ancient British sex romps to those sequences, as if, for all its supposed daring, the film is slightly embarrassed by the erotic.

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Drive-Away Dolls is no disaster. Matt Damon has fun as a hypocritical politician in a last act that cannot be faulted for chutzpah. But nobody will mistake this yellow-pack Coen flick for the real thing.

Drive-Away Dolls is in cinemas from Friday, March 15th