Burn After Reading Review by CJ Simonson

When the Coen Brothers came out with there 2007 Best Picture film No Country For Old Men, the movie turned heads as a turning point in the already established career . The serial killer thriller had something that we hadn’t seen since Fargo, and that was a darker tone. Sure Javier Bardem’s haircut had the hint of something out maybe their 2004’s Ladykillers, but for the most part the movie played it fairly straight forward. Unfortunately Joel and Ethan Coen have now returned to the everlasting well that is mediocre crime comedies.

The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty, The Big Lebowski, and to some extent O Brother, Where Art Though? all seem to be prime examples of the duo’s fascination with normal average people thrown into a world of crime. This all leads to their latest film Burn After Reading, a movie that has a great ensemble cast but fails to get off the ground.

If you take away about 20-30 minutes from Burn After Reading then you’d have a solid film. One that still makes sense but takes away all the unneeded character development and confusing dialogue, two of the minor problems with the movie. But even that won’t save it. The convoluted plot goes no where leading to unexciting plot twists and unsatisfying resolution. The Coen’s (who also wrote the movie) just don’t know where they’re trying to go and this becomes apparent about 30 minutes in when you figure out that NOTHING has happened. Even by the end a character admits to not knowing anything, which is kinda how I felt. If your trying to make a dysfunctional spy caper, try and make it understandable by your audience.

The plot can be overlooked though if your in the movie for laughs. This is one of the key parts where the movie does, for the most part, deliver. Brad Pitt and John Malkovitch really steal their respective scenes but all the actors are either wasted, like Tilda Swinton, or just don’t work, like George Clooney. The comedy is off beat and unfocused spending too much time trying be serious when it should just be funny. The Coen Brothers aren’t Woody Allen but certainly seem to be trying. Allen is able to create natural flowing dialogue funny, the Coen’s struggle through this. A prime example of this is a scene early on in which John Malkovitch, George Clooney, and Tilda Swinton spend 5 minutes talking about cheese. You heard right folks, cheese. There are no awkward pauses, nothing clever to be said, just talk of cheese.

By the end its not that Burn After Reading turned out to be bad. It just fall all over its self trying to be a comedy spy movie and the result is an overwhelmingly mediocre movie. Was this the movie we were all hoping the Coen Brothers to be? No. To be frank they should stick to doing grittier movies like Fargo and Miller's Crossing and leave the kids stuff for less mature directors. Grade—C-