Daily Plastic: Burn After Reading

Movie	Our Take	Other Takes
Burn After Reading Trailer . IMDB	The script chases its tail for an hour and a half and then conks out, tired and strangely satisfied with its catch. Robert Davis Paste Magazine	Burn After Reading has plenty of momentum — short, tight-knit scenes of people arguing, driving, screwing, fighting — and, if you listen hard, you may hear echoes of a portentous old Capitol Hill drama like Advise and Consent. But those echoes are stifled by a farce plot so bleak and unfunny that it freezes your responses after about forty-five minutes. David Denby The New Yorker [T]he Coens' comic masterpiece, The Big Lebowski, is a genre parody, too — the joke being "What if we took a convoluted, Chandleresque L.A. detective story and made the gumshoe a slacker pothead asshole?" But the brothers brought to it the full force of their loopy imagination, and the protagonist (Jeff Bridges) attained so much stature he transcended the gimmick. Burn After Reading is untranscendent, a little tired, the first Coen brothers picture on autopilot. David Edelstein New York Magazine ... Mr. Pitt has been charged with delivering a caricature rather than a character, but because the actor loves playing sidemen and conveys such natural, irrepressible (irresistible) sweetness, he's also one of the film's saving graces. It could use a few more. Manohla Dargis New York Times And one more from New York Masters of the carefully crafted cheap shot, Joel and Ethan Coen have built a career on flippancy.... [T]he Coens return to familiar territory with the parody thriller Burn After Reading, a characteristically supercilious and crisply shot clown show filled with cartoon perfs and predicated on extravagant stupidity. J. Hoberman Village Voice

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