Starring: John Malkovich, George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Brad Pitt
Directors: Joel and Ethan Coen
Category: IIB
After the ecstasy, the comedown - so it is with Joel and Ethan Coen. It seems their masterpieces are always followed by lesser works and Burn After Reading, following on from No Country For Old Men, joins films like The Hudsucker Proxy (which came after Barton Fink) and Intolerable Cruelty (the follow-up to The Man Who Wasn't There) among the slighter efforts in the brothers' canon, despite its star-studded cast.
In this case, however, maybe the cast is a symptom of the underlying problem. The presence of George Clooney, Brad Pitt (left) and John Malkovich, playing a paranoid federal marshal, an idiotic gym instructor and a foul-mouthed CIA analyst respectively, seems to expose the film's lack of an emotional core.
Not that Burn After Reading is unwatchable. It has moments of ingenious humour and serves to remind us how paranoia and cynicism can be hilarious when pushed to extremes.