While this satiric potboiler more simmers than sizzles, Burn After Reading is classic Coen Brothers all the way. Not as bang-up or accessible as last year’s Oscar-lauded No Country For Old Men, this paranoid, greedy little twister is more along the lines of the writing/directing team’s 1996 black comedy Fargo (with a little of their Ladykillers remake and a lot of Hitchcock, at his quirkiest, thrown in).

The always watchable J.K. Simmons has the coveted “final word” in the movie as a clueless (and nameless) C.I.A. superior who watches, dumbstruck, as the strange, sad lives of those he’s surveilling unravel around him. The messy mystery begins when alcoholic Agency analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) loses his 9-to-5 and decides it’s time to retire and explore writing his memoirs. In retort, his icy, unfaithful wife, Katie (Tilda Swinton), decides it’s time to dump the chump and consult an attorney. The lawyer advises that she find the financials and do some thinking on the matter. Mrs. Cox promptly and secretly burns all of their computer files to disk, which she later accidentally drops while changing clothes at Hardbodies Gym.

The financial info, including the super-spy diaries, wind up in the toned hands of boyish 40-year-old personal trainer Chad (Brad Pitt) and fellow workaday employee, Linda (Frances McDormand). Foolish Chad wants to play detective, while unscrupulous Linda sees a way to extort money in order to pay for several cosmetic surgeries she’s been eyeing. They contact both Osborne Cox and the Russian Embassy — which, in turn, alerts the C.I.A.’s least-capable.

Meanwhile, lovelorn Linda starts dating Katie Cox’s secret lover, fussy Federal Marshall Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney), which of course all goes back to the bitter memoirist. Each set of players knows somebody in the circle, but not everyone is on a first-name basis, which leads to a merry-go-round of madness…and murder.

Burn After Reading unspools maddening and meandering, but as long as you’re paying close attention, the rocky road of excess will definitely not lead to the palace of wisdom (what, you are expecting a nice, neat, bow-tied ending from the Coen Brothers? [For the record, I adored the dangling conclusion of No Country For Old Men]). The violence, while minimal, is every bit as brutal as one might expect, and the comedic set-ups are sublime.

Still, in all, if this is your brand of humor, you already know it and you will have an awful lot of fun along the way. The dialogue is delicious, the non-sequiturs (both spoken and visual) are laugh-out-loud funny, and the acting is deliriously arch. Each star in the well-crafted ensemble puts their own expert spin on what could otherwise be an unlikable character.

Burn After Reading is a crime comedy-of-errors that’s pretty much flawless.

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