Burn After Reading? More like Forget After Viewing.

In theaters Friday: Choke (limited), Eagle Eye, The Lucky Ones, Miracle at St. Anna, Nights in Rodanthe (limited)

New on DVD: Deception, High School Musical 2, Pathology, Run Fatboy Run

It’s not that I’m still bitter at Joel and Ethan Coen for stealing a Best Picture Oscar from a more deserving, P.T. Anderson, the director Esquire just profiled as America’s most distinctive and important filmmaker for the 21st Century, and one whose epic There Will Be Blood may tower over the nihilistic Tex Mex jibberish found in No Country for Old Men for the rest of my lifetime, it is really that Burn After Reading, a film I was desperate to like beforehand, simply doesn’t work. The Coens start with a promising premise that’s then devastated either by their own screenwriting ineptitude or sheer misguided existential will with constant tonal and pacing issues that suffocate any life or heart this film may have had at some amniotic stage.

Burn After Reading? More like Forget After Viewing. The thrust of No Country was that “bad things happen”—a juvenile thesis statement even for a movie that was essentially a knock off of The Terminator and Batman Forever, and a Cormac McCarthy adaptation at that, in which, no joke, Woody Harrelson delivered the most moving performance. The point of Burn seems to be “bad things happen and there’s nothing to learn from it.”

Maybe the Coens get a kick out of taking the only honest, likeable character in their film of idiots and moral miscreants and twisting an audience to the point where half of it—the half that isn’t asleep or Netflixing Mad Men on their iPhones—to actually laugh when a drunken lunatic hacks him to death with an ax. Maybe that’s your kind of humor, but it turned me off completely. But so did the bulk of this garish mess that somehow ensnared topflight actors like flies to a trap.

So what’s redeemable about this movie? Well, like I said, the set-up had potential. Two dimwitted personal trainers discover a disc of CIA secrets and try to make a buck off their find. Unfortunately hilarity rarely ensues. Instead we’re treated to a depressing domestic fallout between a cold-hearted witch played by a lifeless Tilda Swinton, who’s cheating on her husband with George Clooney—who cheats of everyone—and John Malkovich, who literally plays himself with a drinking problem. With skunk-streaked blond hair, Brad Pitt’s cheesy gym rat is funny at times, but the one-note performance wears out its welcome like a half-baked SNL sketch, the kind that runs at 11:45 p.m., not at the top of the show. Clooney perhaps comes off best if you find 90 minutes of smarm appealing, otherwise it’s up to J.K. Simmon’s snarky CIA chief to carry the comedy. Unfortunately his very presence, consistently bewildered as he regurgitates with his assistant what we’ve just witnessed on screen, drives home the utter pointlessness of the entire film.

It’s obvious Burn revels in its shallowness, like bad pulp fiction or The Hills, but what I don’t understand is the Coens’ fascination with what they see as a meaningless universe, one where everyone sleeps with everyone else and no one lives long enough to learn anything from their mistakes before getting shot in the head or cut to pieces, as if we’re all just a random series of atoms careening from one fleeting joy or tragedy to the next until it’s all extinguished like a smoker shaking a match. But does anyone actually live as if that’s true?

The answer is no, and that’s why this dark comedy lands squarely in the realm of farce, a genre the Coens handle with the subtly of a butcher trying his hand at styling hair. Besides, we see enough things in real life that seem pointless, at least in the short term. That’s why we look at movies to spend two hours in a world where things do tie together in the end, where there is beauty in the world and love does have meaning, stories with characters that change for the better or at least learn something new about themselves or the world around them. Burn After Reading offers none of that and with too few laughs, it ends up a superficial failure.