BURN AFTER READING

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to say, "The Coen Brothers strike again!" a mere seven months after their Oscar for NO COUNTRY? In BURN AFTER READING, we get the powerhouse studio, Focus Features at the helm. We get George Clooney, Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins AND Brad Pitt. And again, dare I repeat, we've got the Coen Brothers. So naturally, we waited with baited breath for what a movie boasting an all-star cast and a pair of all-star directors could possibly deliver into a late summer plagued by the likes of THE HOUSE BUNNY and THE WOMEN. We waited, and as the credits unrolled, we began to mouth the words..."The Coen Brothers strike..." But then we saw the whole movie. And suddenly the full phrase seemed...generous.

The movie centers around accidental political hijinks which ensue after a CD loaded with potentially but unlikely classified, political material gets found by a numb-nuts gym trainer (Pitt) and his unhappily un-plastic coworker (MacDormand), who wants to leverage their find to get some cash from the Russians so she can carry through with a series of elective plastic surgeries. Other fools (Clooney, Malkovich, Swinton and Jenkins) get dragged into the foray which multiplies in scope until the CIA is involved and JK Simmons, acting as a CIA superior, polishes the cocktail off with a few body burnings.

No worries, nothing that wasn't revealed in the trailer. And the trailer was good. Really good. With banners broadcasting the main names in caps--CLOONEY, PITT, SWINTON--and a hard core musical score, we had no choice to hurry our way to the box office. But the trailer promised something the movie didn't adequately deliver: true humor. There was no shortage of laughs, that's not what I mean to say. It's just that the humor seemed to come from the...formulaics of the plot rather than its originality (give or take an interesting scene with an interesting chair...). We laughed when Brad Pitt danced. We laughed when Gorgeous George acted uncivilized. We laughed every time John Malkovich said the F-word. How typical.

To be honest, I think I would have liked the movie more if it wasn't directed by the Coens and if it wasn't so damn star-studded. Brad "I'm bored with this" Pitt's ridiculousness felt tired and...fake. Unlike Frances McDormand or even Tilda who seemed to fully become their characters (Tilda's quite good at playing the ice queen...), even George only felt half alive. And if Malkovich's claim to fame is only his ability to curse on cue and look really bad on camera...I'll pass.

I can't completely hate on the Coens, though, because the story was clever. I was just disappointed by its delivery. So yeah, they struck, all right. But down, up, again or out is still undecided.

PLOT: Junk in the wrong hands.
THOUGHT: The trailer is the highpoint.
IN FIVE: 3/5

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