Half the Coens, half the fun.

Laurel and Hardy. Abbott and Costello. Morecambe and Wise. Ant and Dec.

For decades, the double act has been a powerful commodity on both the big and small screen. It has made stars and created careers the world over through an irrepressible combined force often far greater than the sum of its parts, and while such success is somewhat rarer behind the camera, fruitful directing duos are far from unheard of.

Whether it’s the Coens, the Wachowskis, the Safdies, or the likes of Powell and Pressburger, if the talent and balance are just right, directing double acts can hit levels many solo filmmakers can only dream of. But what happens when these filmmaking bonds are broken?

Well, as one half of one of the most successful filmmaking partnerships of all time takes his first steps into the great solo unknown, it looks like we’re about to find out.

In search of a fresh start, two women - uninhibited free spirit Jamie (Margaret Qualley) and demure Marian (Geraldine Viswanathan) - embark on an impromptu road trip to Tallahassee, Florida. However, things quickly go awry when they cross paths with a group of inept criminals along the way, forcing them to re-evaluate their relationship both with themselves and one another.

After several decades operating as a highly successful singular filmmaking entity, it really was difficult to picture a world in which Joel and Ethan Coen are off doing their own thing, yet here we are. Furthermore, it’s even trickier to picture two more differing solo debuts than Joel’s The Tragedy of Macbeth and Ethan’s Drive-Away Dolls.

While the former swung for the fences with a taut, simmered down monochrome Shakespeare adaptation, the latter has well and truly stuck to his guns. The question of who has been more successful with their debut is somewhat subjective, however, let’s just say, Drive-Away Dolls won’t be bothering anyone’s Coen Brothers favourites lists any time soon.

Make no mistake, Drive-Away Dolls feels like half the Coen Brothers film it is. For all intents and purposes, Drive-Away Dolls is a Coen movie cover version and gives off the distinct impression of a first-year film student’s desperate attempt to recreate that classic Coen energy without any idea of how to pull it off.

Like someone putting on a Ringo album when Revolver is right there, Drive-Away Dolls feels like a semi-skimmed version of its full fat predecessors, one that would be easy to overlook had Ethan Coen in any way attempted to differentiate his solo debut from anything that went before.

Unlike Joel’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, Drive-Away Dolls feels inextricably tethered to the likes of Barton Fink, The Big Lebowski, and Fargo, daring to invite comparisons without ever backing it up, ultimately coming off closer to the Coen’s most disappointing effort, Burn Before Reading, than anything else. Loaded with quirkiness but with zero substance behind it, Drive-Away Dolls is a lamentably hollow viewing experience that fails to deliver with any one of its comedy, drama, or crime caper elements.

Zany, trashy, and cartoonish in appearance but incredibly flimsy in construction, the film clearly knows what it’s aiming for but never knows how to achieve it. With try-hard editing and gratingly ostentatious direction from the off, Drive-Away Dolls is frequently unbearable, spending most of its runtime desperately forcing its idiosyncrasies on you whether you like it or not.

Ultimately, the film is unsatisfying and undercooked in almost every way. Whether it’s the underdeveloped plot or the half-arsed characters, Ethan Coen and co-writer/wife Tricia Cook make the odd decision to dispense with any notion of an engaging plot or character development and replace them instead with a string of flimsy gags, ramshackle vulgarity, and over-egged wackiness.

The result is a conveyor belt of grating, cameo-heavy characters and writing that borders on intolerable for most of Drive-Away Dolls’ mercifully brief 84-minute runtime. Thankfully, there are nice moments to be found here and there, however, they are routinely undermined by the film’s unavoidable issues.

As our protagonists, Margaret Qualley and Geraldine Viswanathan make for an effective odd couple partnership and it’s through their onscreen chemistry that Drive-Away Dolls manages to salvage something from the mess. They don’t come often, but the pairs’ quieter moments, as they slowly open up to one another, are surprisingly touching, and while they’re tonally jarring up against the goofy shenanigans around them, these more personal scenes land relatively well.

Despite the writing’s best (or worst) efforts, Qualley and Viswanathan do what they can with the poor hand they’re dealt, offering an odd couple dynamic that carries most of the film. Through Qualley’s carefree chaos and Viswanathan’s buttoned-down reticence, there’s an undeniable energy there that threatens to make Drive-Away Dolls engaging, if not entirely enjoyable.

It’s this will-they-won’t-they relationship that injects some purpose and emotional energy into proceedings and it’s in the pair’s more intimate moments that Drive-Away Dolls flirts with something altogether more impactful. Rare though they may be, these scenes, where the pair prod and poke at their queerness and their own feelings for one another, feel like little bursts of fresh air amidst the film’s otherwise stale energy.

To this end, Jamie and Marian’s queerness, as with the rest of the film, is forthright and commendably candid. It doesn’t cover up just how underwhelming Drive-Away Dolls is, but this level of queer representation from any mainstream Hollywood release can’t be discounted entirely. This bullish representation is certainly refreshing, and the film’s stars do their utmost to ensure things click in that respect, however, almost everything else about Drive-Away Dolls conspires to undercut it.

Limp, undercooked, and severely lacking drive, the film’s rambling, pointless plot underwhelms on every level. Like the rest of the film, Drive-Away Dolls’ narrative feels wholly uninspired and manages to ape half the Coen Brothers’ back catalogue without putting in the necessary effort to make it work.

The result is a very slight, very tiresome road trip crime caper that splutters along, occasionally threatening to capitalise on its genre-blending approach, but ultimately going nowhere. In a desperate bid to keep things interesting, Ethan Coen regularly resorts to deploying big name cameos, yet they all feel shallow, gratuitous, and painfully self-serving, offering little more beyond surface-level intrigue.

Despite the pedigree of its director and the potential of its setup, Drive-Away Dolls is a limp, flat tyre of a film. A lightweight plot, try-hard editing, and a string of painfully quirky characters give it the air of a first-year film student's desperate attempt to forge a Coen Brothers movie, yet offers very little of substance to back itself up. With half the Coens involved, Drive-Away Dolls delivers a fraction of the fun, as life away from his brother gets off to a sputtering start for Ethan.