'Burn After Reading' (R) (out of four)

More than one critic has emerged from "Burn After Reading" in a state of bewilderment, confused as to why Joel and Ethan Coen -- still riding high off the success they enjoyed with last year's Oscar winner "No Country For Old Men" -- would follow up such a substantive and stylized story of life and death with something so downright goofy.

But in many ways, "Burn After Reading" is cut from the same reckless cloth and affords its stars much the same opportunity to play against type that "No Country" offered Javier Bardem, Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin. And while in the end it may be far less serious or coherent than the last Coen brothers film, "Burn" is no less sophisticated in the way it spoofs and critiques the stereotypes of the standard Hollywood thriller.

From the first scene, it's obvious that the details don't much matter, and that the plot is a thin shell of a thing. We meet Osborne Cox (a crotchety, arrogant John Malkovich) on the day he is being demoted at the CIA. They cite Osborne's drinking problem, which could in theory jeopardize national security -- and he tells them to shove it and quits on the spot.

Returning home dejected, Osborne commits himself to writing a memoir, although his wife, Katie (a laser-eyed Tilda Swinton), wonders who the heck would actually spend money on a story so boring. She is sick of being married to Obsorne and the financial insecurity is the last straw. She's going to divorce him in favor of Harry (a buffoonish George Clooney), the man she's been sleeping with.

But this fractured family drama becomes something far more convoluted when a CD-ROM packed with confidential CIA data is found on the locker room floor at a local gym. Popping the disc into a computer, both Linda Litzke (a wide-eyed Frances McDormand) and Chad (an animated Brad Pitt) are confused by what they see. It's Osborne's memoir in progress, we'll learn later, but Linda doesn't really care about the content as much as its value.

She devises a plan to turn this discovery into cash, strolling into the Russian embassy and offering to hand over the CD in exchange for a bribe.

Round and round all this insanity goes, really leading nowhere. And that's exactly the point: None of this means much of anything at all. In another story, these secrets would be crucial to the national security, their theft would be a sophisticated act of espionage, and the government would rush into action to get that CD back. But in "Burn After Reading," we watch these dopes run around in circles, always frantic and always clueless.

Osborne is more a drunk than a spy. Harry is more a pervert than a passionate Don Juan. Linda and Chad are two clueless opportunists way out of their league. Even Osborne's former CIA superiors seem mystified as to how to do their jobs.

Personality by personality, the Coen brothers skewer the spy genre (you can almost hear them chuckling behind the camera) and the more they exaggerate the characters, the more addictive this whole farce becomes. Just like they did with "The Big Lebowski," a kidnapping drama that gave way to a stoner comedy, here the Coens give us a spy thriller without a clue, populated with average schmucks who don't know the first thing about being a spy -- or a hero.

The humor of the situation is to be found in the absurd emptiness of it all. No one seems to have much of a plan here, nor do they seem in much of a rush to get one. If the spy thrillers of old were about sophisticated governments and street-smart secret agents leveraging for the upper hand, then "Burn After Reading" presents us with a scarier -- and funnier -- prospect: a universe built atop apathy, where the government is no better than the citizenry, in which fools preside over fools and where everyone is asleep at the wheel.