Movie Review

Burn After Reading

With an all stare cast that includes John Malkovich, Brad Pitt, and George Clooney a moviegoer would expect an award-winning plot and script. Burn After Reading wasn't nominated for any Oscars awards.

I'm a huge fan of total messed up movies, American Beauty, Eternal Sunshine, and Closer all fall into that category. All are movies that involve either heart break, death, and/or sleeping around with other peoples spouses. Burn after reading has all of my favorite aspects for a movie but fell short on any true meaning.

There is meaning in American Beauty. Everyone is looking for something beautiful in there lives where decay has replaced beauty. One boy in the movie manages to find beauty in everything, including garbage. The line at the end, when Lester is talking about how it feels to have died, he says “but it's hard to stay mad, when there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life...” That is meaningful, some times you just need to breath.

Eternal Sunshine is another movie that had deep meaning. The big question brought on by this movie is “Would you erase your past memories?” This movie shows us what would happen if we did and the life lesson is – we need our past. Our past makes us who we are today and if erase it we are doomed to repeat it.

I don't believe in movies with happy endings because real life is in high demand yet short supply of happy endings. I want movies that give me the real life pain that is floating around other people’s lives. I can either sympathize with movies like that or fell good that my own life isn't like that. Burn After Reading has no happy ending but falls short on being a movie one can relate to.

People are sleeping around with each other and everyone is within 6 degrees of one another and this can be related to. Innocent people getting killed because they were in the wrong place at the wrong time and this can be related to. There was a group of men that belonged to some government group who held no reliance to the plot of the movie and that could not be related to.

The opening scene that had the men in suits added to the movie but the rest of the scenes with them in it didn't. The movie would have made more sense and been easier for me to follow if they had cut the men in suits out of it completely.

This could have been a great movie. It held all the elements that I enjoy. It also held those men in suits that didn’t add to the plot of the movie at all. Burn After Reading had the ability to have some great and profound meaning but it choose not to. A movie that is as serious as this should have some poetic meaning or it should have been a comedy.


The movie trailer for this movie made it seem like it would be funny. But all of the funny scenes were in the trailer. This is something of a problem in the movie industry.