Richard Wilson? I don't believe it!

I wasn’t much looking forward to watching Burn After Reading the other day. Any film that gets described as being “not as good as The Big Lebowski”, a comparison against one of the most overrated films of all time isn’t much of an endorsement to me. Anyhow, no worries, it was still good to get back in the cinema swing again after a bit of a break.

The plot revolves around a bunch of characters with lives all crossing at some point, so I won’t bore you with the details. Let’s just say there are some incompetent CIA agents, some even more incompetent gym employees and other people who get conveniently confused and/or jump to wrong conclusions. You get the idea. Oh, and pretty much everyone is sleeping with the other characters to form some weird love-parallalagram. All sounds a bit Carry On, doesn’t it?

More importantly, is it any good?

Well, it’s watchable and I didn’t dislike it as much as I thought I perhaps would, but that’s about as enthusiastic as I can get. For a comedy, it barely raised more than a smile. Plus for a film that is only just over an hour and a half long it seemed an awful lot longer. Brad Pitt’s character was good, and shit, but I really can’t bring myself to give Burn After Reading anything more than 5/10.

Or is that too generous?