Burn After Reading - But what did I just read?

Rating: 7/10 (27 April 2014)

Burn After Reading is Coen, no doubt, but it doesn't feel complete, its the first film of theirs that I feel the characters don't exist out side of this film, anything out of frame does not exist!. The characters feel like caricatures with a built in code - be this kind of character. Brad Pitt is the quirky, dumb character with a good heart. John Malkovich is the just got sacked, angry all the time, old man. George Clooney is your typical full of himself, womanizer douchebag.
Im not saying this is a bad thing, The characters are actually pretty fun to watch go through their daily struggles, get pulled into a tangled web of deceit, lies, cheating, plastic surgery, love and CIA intelligence.
The film has this keen eye for the over the top. Every situation is only slightly unbelievable, only slightly over the top. The way these characters interact is like their jumping out of different films and colliding at that one point and time, None of them seem to know anything, all of them have some ulterior motives that make them seem like the most despicable people in the world.
Nothing actually gets resolved either, There's even a scene at the end where J.K Simmons himself says that 'we learned nothing'. Was the last 90 minutes a waste of time then? No, I think its just the classic Coen brothers curveball, start sub-plots then drop them and end with no resolution, just like life in a way. The way the characters were set up also leads us to the fact they never would get much of a resolution anyway.
Overall, Burn After Reading is a great comedy from the Coen's. It didn't set the world on fire and unlike The Big Lebowski, 6 years later, it still hasn't, but its a fun, quirky film that is still a must see for any fan of the Coen brothers.