Movie Review: Burn After Reading

A flash for the dramatic has always been the staple of the Coen Brothers’ filmwork.

Always perfectly cast, brilliantly written (smart), their work has also been recognized simply as America’s best (No Country for Old Men).

The same reaches to a certain extent in Burn After Reading, their latest release.

Linda Litzke, J.K Simmons, Brad Pitt – they were brilliant.

Perhaps a more likeable George Clooney, or maybe more dim-witted (not smart), would make the basis of the movie – confusion – work for the better.

But the plot – which is much less complex then intended – failed to capture my attention and barely reached imaginative (not very smart).

It’s basically the traditional triangle of love– if you call Clooney’s love sincere. After all, he’s a female-preying-on-the-internet-predator that falls into the lap of a hapless Linda Litzke, whose overall air headedness complements Brad Pitt’s.

They take a CD they find at the fitness center they work at – and because of Litzke’s unsatisfactory love life – she goes, yes, online to find people like George Clooney on the other end – and demand money from a Russian embassy – for Litzke to get plastic surgery.

Though the CD does belong to an alcoholic washed-up ex-CIA John Malkovich, it contains information of little consequence, which irks not only an inflamed Malkovich (at the pair’s stupidity), but falsely alerts the CIA headquarters, whose head – J.K. Simmons, orders the disposal of all bodies involved without hesitation.

Think Simmons as the Spiderman newspaper editor – he’s right on.

So now you’re left with Litzke meeting Clooney, yes, online, who then proceeds to sleep with Malkovich’s wife, then finds out that his very own wife has been mulling divorce, and in-fact does have another man on the side.

Pitt finds himself in Malkovich’s apartment – to ‘investigate” – and shoots himself with Clooney’s gun.

So Clooney flees. Litzke is left love-less and money-less. The end.

Brad Pitt, for as little face-time he did get, stole the show from a narcissistic Clooney.

Perhaps his best exchange is with a baffled Malkovich over the phone: “Osbourne Cox? I thought you might be wooorrried...about the secuuurrrity...of your shit.”

And in person (after being threatened): “You thought it was a Schwinn.”

And like his stupidity, the overdrawn and over-complex plot takes a turn for the worse – when Pitt dies.

Inconclusive, inconsequential closure gives way to more confusion. But not the smart kind.

It’s the kind that cries, “Why?”