Burn Before Watching

Rating: 1/10 (10 August 2009)

The Coen Brothers' "Burn After Reading" is a movie so thoughtless, so arrogant, and so poorly executed that it has forced me to re-consider my opinion of their previous films and seriously raised the question of whether they've been frauds all along.
Joel & Ethan C. have always had an "offbeat" sense of humor and an "unusual" way of making movies, but fans like myself have always reasoned they were simply following their Muse and making the movies they had to make. With "Burn After Reading" they present us with an espionage "spoof" whose sense of humor is on par with that of the world's worst rejected sitcom pilot, and you have to wonder: Is this what they've truly been all along?
Brad Pitt, George Clooney & Frances McDormand all star as Themselves; no attempt is made at building characters or adhering to any storyline reality. Brad dances because he likes to dance, George panics because it worked well in "O Brother." The "plot" is ostensibly about amateurs entering the spy game with comedic results, but it breaks down so fast and so completely it's not even worth mentioning.
No matter how many times McDormand blinks cute and begs us to remember Fargo's Marge there's no hiding the fact that the finished product here looks as if there was NO development done whatsoever. The movie feels like Joel & Ethan thought it would be a lark and filmed the whole deal in a week with a digital camera. The garbage that resulted is the death of cinema: Hollywood home videos with million dollar paychecks.
I reserve the F grade for movies that are beyond bad movies that have somehow crossed the line between respectable failure and offensive insult. If you like movies you'll avoid this one, and if you like the Coen Brothers you won't after witnessing the crime they commit here. Stay far away.
GRADE: F