Review: Contrived 'Burn After Reading' disappoints

(CNN) -- After the exceptionally hard-hitting "No Country for Old Men," the Coen brothers have flipped back to their default mode -- screwball farce -- in this disappointing return to the indifferent form that has plagued them over the past 10 years.

Cross-purposes and mistaken identities are centrifugal forces in the Coen brothers' cinematic universe, a tragicomic place where the co-creators snicker at their characters' best-laid plans.

And so it is in this Byzantine D.C. tale of a retired spook (John Malkovich), his mercenary wife (Tilda Swinton), her lover (George Clooney) and the pair of dim-witted personal-fitness trainers who stumble across a disc with the CIA guy's personal information on it and figure a little extortion won't hurt anyone.

How wrong can you be?

Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) is an innocuous airhead who pretty much does whatever his friend Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand) says.

She's not malicious either, only she needs the money for her plastic surgeries ("I've got about as far as I can go with this body").

This is America: When opportunity presents itself, you're entitled to it -- even if that means selling out your country to the Russians.

Linda is also going the Internet dating route, which is how she meets Harry (Clooney), who is beginning to suspect that he's being followed -- perhaps by his lover's arrogant and irascible husband, Osborne (Malkovich)?

Confused? I was. We're led to infer the disc contains Osborne's potentially explosive memoirs -- or is it his financial records, as a later scene indicates?

Either way, why should Chad leap to the conclusion that this is classified information and Osborne will pay for its return? If he doesn't, there's no movie. If Chad and Osborne have a civil conversation, there's no movie. If Chad and Linda have two brain cells to rub together, there's no movie.

So, it's contrived. Farce always is. And the Coens take a cynical view of human nature in the nation's capital, but then who doesn't?

The trouble with "Burn After Reading" is not that its compulsive, unhappy, angry, greedy, disloyal, deceitful and hopelessly stupid personnel are unrecognizable or even unrepresentative, it's that they're not particularly funny. Watch why 'Mr. Moviefone' has a different view »

Encouraged to play up their characters' one-dimensional personalities, the stars mostly stick to type. Clad in Spandex and sipping on Gatorade, Pitt is fun as the hypernaive Chad, and nobody rants and rails like Malkovich with a hatchet in his hand, but there's a prevailing sourness that stifles too many of the laughs.

The most enjoyable performances come from David Rasche as a CIA operative trying to fathom what's behind this mystifying flurry of chicanery and violence, and J.K. Simmons as his perplexed superior, content to put a lid over the entire mess and move on.

Carter Burwell's declamatory score tries to mock up notes of suspense and paranoia, but Joel and Ethan Coen only cast a cursory glance in that direction.

Suspense requires a degree of empathy, and they're at their most aloof here. The result is every bit as disposable as the title implies.

"Burn After Reading" is as nihilistic as "No Country for Old Men," but it's a pointless exercise, and there's precious little joy in it.

All About Coen Brothers • Brad Pitt