Burn after Reading

Posted May 23, 2012 by Speed - 0 comments

The CIA is fed up with Osbourne Cox and decides to transfer him to another department but that’s not to the liking of Osbourne who therefore decides to quit entirely and focus on writing a book. When a cd with several data from his book get in the hands of two rather stupid employees of the local gym, they think they’ve gotten their hands on real CIA secrets and decide to blackmail Cox in the hopes of getting a lot of money for returning it. However, they’ve got no idea what they’ve gotten themselves into and when both the Russian embassy and the CIA get involved, things go completely wrong…

Sound and Vision:
The image quality is decent with good amount of detail, sharp images, and no apparent use of edge enhancement. Compression errors are also down to a minimum.

The sound does what it’s supposed to do with clear dialogues coming from the front center speaker but the surrounds and subwoofer hardly get any action.

Extras:
– The Making Of
– DC Insiders
– Welcome back George

Three extras that clearly are shot around the same time and could easily be packed together as one big feature. We get to see behind the screens footage as well as interview fragments with the cast and crew. Quite interesting stuff for once though.

Conclusion:
Burn After Reading is yet another comedy from the Coen brothers who are famous for making movies like The Big Lebowki, No Country for Old Men and Fargo. Unfortunately, although Burn After Reading has a similar setup of completely insane comedy, it lacks some real punch to be at the same level of those other movies and the only achievement you can give this film is that we get to see Brad Pitt play a totally infantile gym boy.

The acting is pretty decent, but the storyline goes forward without a clear direction, making it look like there’s no focus other than the CIA being stupid idiots, everyone sleeping with everyone and real morons getting what they want.

No, Burn After Reading doesn’t manage to rise above average and there’s little to make the viewer truly interested in what’s going on. Unlike Fargo where similar insane events do manage to entertain. Better luck next time!

Kyle XY Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip – The Complete Series