not their best but still very funny

Rating: 7/10 (13 September 2008)

"Burn After Reading" shows what happens when a couple of bungling amateurs attempt to beat the big boys of the C.I.A. at their own game.
Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand are the D.C.-based health club workers who stumble across a computer disc that they believe contains top secret, classified information. In actuality, it's the property of Osbourne Cox, a C.I.A. analyst who has recently been let go from the agency, and who is composing his memoirs as an act of retaliation against his former bosses. Tilda Swinton plays Osbourne's harridan wife who's having an affair with a tic-plagued, exercise-obsessed married man embodied by George Clooney. The discovery of the disc leads to a roundelay of false assumptions and comical misunderstandings all wrapped up in an intricately plotted scenario dripping with situational ironies.
"Burn After Reading" is Joel and Ethan Coen's darkly humorous follow-up to their Oscar-winning masterpiece, "No Country for Old Men," a grimly serious work that took little time out for comic relief (and earned them bucket loads of awards for doing so). This new film finds the boys back in the more familiar terrain of "Fargo" and "The Big Lebowski," where the laughs outnumber the gasps by a healthy margin. "Burn After Reading" certainly adheres to the customary Coen Brothers formula where a heightened quirkiness and a deliberately disjointed storyline are coupled with sudden flare-ups of violence and the unexpected deaths of major characters.
While the refusal to follow a predictable narrative path is one of the chief selling points of any Coen Brothers film, the fact of the matter is that, in the case of "Burn After Reading," the script probably could have used a few more revisions to bring the disparate elements more satisfactorily in line with one another. Too often it feels as if the movie itself is rambling around pointlessly, without any clear direction or purpose. For one thing, many of the scenes that might have served as the connecting tissue holding the various story lines together seem to have been - perhaps deliberately - left on the cutting-room floor. We're laughing along with the craziness all right, but we're also hoping against hope that the filmmakers will find a way to bring it all together in the end. Instead, what we get is a sit-down synopsis of events that is probably the least successful finale of that sort since the closing scene in "Psycho." For if viewers think they were frustrated by the truncated ending in "No Country," they ain't seen nuttin' yet.
The best thing about "Burn After Reading" is the delicious performances from a cast that any director would give his eyeteeth to work with. Malkovich, McDormand, Clooney, and Swinton all manage to define their characters through individualized quirks without ever going over the top and reducing their characters to caricatures. But it is Pitt who steals every scene he's in as the nerdy, hyper kinetic doofus who fancies himself a double-naught spy fit to stand alongside the James Bonds of the world. Pitt has rarely been this winning.
Now don't get me wrong. "Burn After Reading" is a frequently hilarious film that is vastly preferable to all those cookie-cutter comedies that can be found habitually ensconced in the neighborhood multiplexes. But it's not exactly prime Coen Brothers either, and, for that reason, I have to make this only a halfhearted recommendation. But, then again, even inferior Coen Brothers is better than no Coen Brothers at all.