“Burn After Reading” is a movie with the potential to be very good but it has lousy execution. This is a film from the Coen brothers (“Raising Arizona”, “Big Lebowski”) and for the first time I don’t think they’ve made a film that works.

In “Burn After Reading”, ex-government analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich “Johnny English”, “Being John Malkovich”) finds his secretive memoirs end up in the hands of gym employees Chad (Brad Pitt “World War Z”, “Fight Club”) and Linda (Frances McDormand “Almost Famous”) as the duo intend the blackmail Cox or sell it. The whole film is about the knock-on effect all the characters have on each other and while it in some ways is done well, the fatal flaw is that the characters are dull making it all worthless.

Brad Pitt and Francis McDormand come across as really quite annoying as the two gym employees and while you argue that they intended to be somewhat like this I felt it just didn’t work. George Clooney (“Gravity”) mumbles most of his lines here and that really got on my nerves. I think John Malkovich’s character is reasonably interesting but he’s given too little screen-time for his character to fully develop. By far the best characters are the government workers discussing the entire situation in a few brief scenes as they provide some humorous moments.

“Burn After Reading” isn’t particularly funny and the tension just doesn’t work. It’s the kind of story I can see being part of a film by Quentin Tarantino (“Pulp Fiction”) and it’s something I can see being done better by him; in fact a lot of the Coen brothers’ films have a Tarantino quality to them, maybe it’s because it mixes violence and comedy in a similar way. The Coen brothers have always impressed me with their crazy characters but here they hold out on us.