People are, essentially, idiots. In a celebrated career that's so far spanned 13 films with pretty much everything from singing convicts, kidnapped babies and hula hoops to wife abduction, a sociopath hit man with the world's worst haircut and ten-pin bowling, that's the one thing the Coen brothers keep telling us. And, just in case we didn’t get the message after 25 years, the star-packed 'Burn After Reading' forces the point home with as much subtlety as Anton Chigurh's cattle gun.

You see, everyone in this wicked black comedy is a Grade A knucklehead. Harry Pfarrer (George Clooney) — addicted to jogging and afternoon sex with any woman but his wife — believes his job title (federal marshal) makes him more James Bond than ageing womaniser. It doesn't.

Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) is a self righteous mid-level CIA analyst with anger management issues and, since being fired, plenty of free time to sit around in his dressing gown, working on his dull memoirs.

Chad Feldheimer (Brad Pitt) is a Ritalin-deprived gym instructor (catch his treadmill routine or iPod dance freakout) who has seen one too many espionage movies. Discovering Cox's ramblings on a misplaced CD, he's convinced the Russians will pay top dollar for the "high level US national security info". And into his spy game is roped co-worker Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), a desperate middle-aged wallflower convinced that plastic surgery will finally land her a man.

One of the men she does land (and bed) in the interim is Pfarrer, looking for another conquest outside his illicit affair with Cox's wife Katie (Tilda Swinton)…

Even, yes, an idiot can figure out that all their little lives will come crashing together in a tightly plotted satire of US Intelligence that's all botched anonymous phone calls, accidental shootings, hatchet jobs (literally), workouts and DIY. But for all its stupidity and silliness — the preposterously pedantic Malkovich is a ticking time bomb; Pitt is all hyperactivity and bleached hair as the clueless man child — there's not much to the Coen's latest. Certainly no classic, it's on a par with the likes of 'The Ladykillers' and 'Intolerable Cruelty', the work of two brothers clearly just out to have fun after the bleak 'No Country For Old Men'.

Burn after reading? Forget after watching.