The Cohen's miss all their usual marks to produce an "OK" film but no more than that

Rating: Null/10 (13 June 2011)

Although I've seen True Grit recently, I am a few films behind with the Cohen's and watching Burn after Reading was part of me catching up. The film has a deliberately complex plot as innocent blackmail by two gym employees sees them accidentally mixed up with two couples each going through divorce and the CIA. Everyone's motives and intentions are misconstrued and soon confusion leads to messy and bloody misunderstandings. Although I had heard mixed reviews about the film, it did seem like rather an open goal for them since this was the sort of thing they had done before to great effect in Blood Simple and Fargo: small people in over their heads as a simple crime spins out of control.
For some reason though, they get it wrong here and mostly their usual darkly comic is missing. The oddball characters are all here but the plot is far too messy and has far too many characters in the mix. This doesn't matter too much as the film passed the halfway point because by then it had a bit of momentum and all was clear, but as it laid out the plot everything seemed to be going nowhere and each character seemed to add little. Once the plot is clear the other problems start coming out. The first is that it is not as well written as previous films. The characters all have potential to be comic oddballs but they don't really come off and nobody here is a classic Cohen creation. The comedy doesn't really work as it should either and it didn't have that darkly comic feel that Fargo and other films did. It wasn't that I expected to laugh, but I just didn't have the otherworldly feel that they often give me.
I know that part of the point of the film was that the plot was a complex mess but for me it was also a problem because this messy aspect tended to detract more than it added. The additions were the couple of great scenes with the two intelligence heads trying to get a handle on what was happening – these were funny and both characters were what I would expect. In the rest the mess is not funny or smart or engaging enough to stand up and, while amusing and able to hold my attention, still feels like it is the Cohen's underperforming. The many star names actually don't help as much as one would have liked. Clooney is amusing and works well enough but, while I liked Pitt's attempts at his character, I never once thought he was able to shake off the idea that he was Brad Pitt "doing" quirky. McDormand is good though, this is the sort of stuff that she does and she does it well. Malkovich, Swinton and Jenkins all add to the feeling that there are too many people in the film who are their faces first and their characters second. Simmons and Rasche are great though – if the film had more scenes like theirs it would have been better for it.
Overall Burn after Reading is a sub-par performance from the Cohen's. It has aspirations to be the darkly comic crime film that they have done before and, on paper, all the absurdity and characters are there, but they just don't work as they should on the screen. The mess is part of it, but it also detracts, while the characters are not that good nor the film smart enough, engaging enough or funny enough. The Cohen's on an off-day is still worth seeing, but they have done better and will do again.