Criminal waste of talent due to script holes

Rating: 4/10 (28 February 2019)

So about 2/3 of "Burn After Reading" is terrific, classic Coen brothers, with stellar actors making the most out of their somewhat cartoonish characters. (Clooney and Pitt ham it up, quite agreeably, while Malkovich and McDormand tease out a little depth from their characters, but Richard Jenkins and Tilda Swinton are mostly wasted with throwaway parts). There's not a ton of suspense, which indicates maybe the brothers were a bit off their game, but there's plenty of tragic-comic premise to go around here in a tale of middle-aged burnout and false aspirations to change one's game while it's in progress.
But, without giving any spoilers here, the problem is the script really falls apart in the last third of the movie. Perhaps it was studio edits, but the scenes with JK Simmons as a senior CIA official in which he and an underling recap the plot and then, unforgivably, do the kind of wrap-up that is usually shown on screen about each of the characters, suggests they ran out of shoot time and just had to tack those bits in in order to give any sense of closure about the plot and characters' fates. (The one such scene in the middle reminds me oddly of the Santa Rosa policemen in "Mad Mad Mad Mad World", who connect the threads of the various characters' journeys by explicating a little with a map for the audience, although unlike "Burn After Reading" that was rather deftly done.) In the end, if you don't go "what, that's it?" like I did, I would in turn be surprised.
I'd love to find out the story (there must be one) about where this production went off the skids. But my rec is: don't waste your time.