After being handsomely rewarded by Oscar in 2007 for Best Picture ‘No Country for Old Men,’ the Coens apparently deserve a break. Accordingly, their newest stunt in self-enchanted child’s play would be better off broken into little pieces and swept under the rug. The five-way caricature collision ‘mdash; over an unidentified computer disk ‘mdash; follows one philandering marshal (George Clooney), two airhead fitness-club employees (Brad Pitt, Frances McDormand), an imperceptive ex-CIA suit (John Malkovich) and his frigid wife (Tilda Swinton) in a breach of comedy’s First Commandment: Thou Shalt Not Try So Hard.
Blinded by cockiness, the clueless D.C. residents scramble in exhausting confusion for an hour and a half, until finally we reach a frustrating epiphany ‘mdash; the film’s point is, in fact, a study in pointlessness. Its all-star actors get lost in the same character (a middle-aged, narcissistic nobody), and since that nobody doesn’t mean much to the Coens, it’s unsurprising when we, too, lose all interest. A void of any substantial interaction between multiple pawns leaves us wondering if the actors, like their characters, are talking just to hear how awesome they sound. Lacking that magical Judd Apatow humor, the brothers fail to direct a film starring their buddies that’s as fun to watch as it probably was to make. Though the duo has, in the past, successfully critiqued a faulty world with straightfaced irony ‘mdash; see ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’ ‘mdash; their latest is told as one big, pretentious inside joke. And no one’s laughing.