What's wrong with this picture?

Not much, actually.

I popped down to the local multiplex the other night to see Burn After Reading, the Coen Brothers' latest, and much anticipated, film. Despite all the praise they get, I've never really been able to love a lot of their films - particularly their recent work. I really liked Fargo and No Country For Old Men, obviously, which was great and deserved all the awards and acclaim that it received earlier this year. Of course, No Country was an adaptation of a novel so perhaps that explains why it had a narrative that managed to stay the course without disappearing up the sort of blind alleys that were so evident in the likes of Intolerable Cruelty, O Brother Where Art Thou and The Man Who Wasn't There. And I know everybody loves The Big Lebowski but I just found it a bit tedious after a while.

Anyway, it's been odd reading the reviews of Burn after Reading. Apart from one or two that suggested that the Coens are treading water at the moment, the reviews have been mostly negative. I don't get it. I suppose there's a certain smugness about the film. Everyone involved seem rather pleased with themselves. George Clooney and Brad Pitt both get to act like a pair of idiots and Frances McDormand and John Malkovich are given the chance to play unlikeable characters and swear a lot. There's a lot of swearing in Burn After Reading but swearing's ok, isn't it?

The plot? Well this may be the problem.. Essentially it's a good old-fashioned espionage/blackmail/revenge thriller. It's got spies behaving like fools and fools trying to behave like spies. There's lots of infidelity and casual sex. There's lots of loneliness and pathos too as everything spirals out of control. It starts with John Malkovich's character, Osbourne Cox, getting fired by the CIA. He feels he (literally) has an axe to grind so he decides to write a tell-all memoir about the Agency. However, the disc he's saved it onto falls into the hands of a pair of gym trainers, Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand, who cluelessly attempt to blackmail him. When that fails, they decide to take it to the Russians. And then it all kicks off. George Clooney gurns and mumbles away humorously (or annoyingly, depending on your mood) as an adulterous, paranoid Treasury Agent who's having an affair with Tilda Swinton. She's married to Malkovich's character but not for much longer.. You'll also find Richard Jenkins in there as the owner of the gym, Hardbodies, that Brad and Frances work in.

I suppose it's all very slight, yet quite complicated at the same time but it's funny. And shocking. And a little violent too. And it zips along and is done in a little over 90 minutes. So what's not to love? Even if it doesn't make sense to you there's a couple of great cameos from JK Simmons (him out of Spiderman) and David Rasche (him out of Sledgehammer) as clueless CIA bosses trying to figure out all the chaos that's going on round them. They pop up once or twice to explain to themselves (and the audience) what's going on. The film ends with the two of them summarising what's just happened and I reckon it's probably the funniest couple of minutes I'll see in the cinema this year. Funnier than anything in Tropic Thunder anyway

So, it's funny, exciting, violent (but not too violent) and has a great cast. So why have the critics almost unanimously taken a shovel to it? Perhaps because it's not Fargo or No Country For Old Men. Fair enough but what else is? It's still very good and, make no mistake, if this was directed by anyone else it would be hailed as one of the year's best..

And I haven't even mentioned what George Clooney spends most of the film building in his basement!