The Coen Brothers upcoming CIA comedy “Burn After Reading” has just hit the Venice film festival, and not everyone is loving it. And just as we kind of suspected all along (or seemingly anyhow), it’s a little too buffoonish for it’s own good.
This stand to reason, outside of “No Country For Old Men,” the Coens have been very hit and miss where their comedy is concerned in recent years and people seemt to have forgotten this.
The Hollywood Reporter is calling ‘Reading’ a “minor piece of silliness.” “Their review calls the film an “anti-spy thriller in which nothing is at stake, no one acts with intelligence and everything ends badly. Those who relish it might treat it as the second coming of ‘The Big Lebowski’; those who don’t might wonder at a story in which no character has a level head.”
We actually liked some of the minor comedy works of the Coens in recent years, or at least moments of them (“Intolerable Cruelty,” “The Lady Killers”), but there’s no getting around the fact most of them are flawed films that shit the bed in the third act and sometimes rather badly.
HR’s rivals, Variety aren’t much kinder to the film. “A dark goofball comedy about assorted doofuses in Washington, D.C., the short, snappy picture tries to mate sex farce with a satire of a paranoid political thriller, with arch and ungainly results,” they wrote.
The Variety review only gets worse and basically says the A-list cast is in service of a trifle. “A seriously talented cast has been asked to act like cartoon characters in this tale of desperation, mutual suspicion and vigorous musical beds, all in the name of laughs that only sporadically ensue.” They ultimately call it a “silly flameout.” [via Hollywood Elsewhere]
It’s maybe not all bad, the Guardian U.K. says, the film is “tightly wound and crisp,” but also calls it an “afterthought,” and says it remains to be seen whether the Coen Brothers will attend the Oscars again this year (duh, no way, this film was never built with Academy gold in mind).
Everyone’s got to weigh in on their own, but we can’t say we’re surprised and we’ve been basically saying it looked that thin and hapless from the get-go. We’re also a little surprised about all the bloggers who got on board with this one without any sense of doubt or hesitation considering their recent comedic missteps. It’s like the Academy Award had blinded people or something. Either way, time will soon tell what we think about the movie. The film opens soon on September 12 and we’ll hopefully see it at the Toronto film festival a bit before that.
