2007 was a bumper year for serious films. Joe Wright had his romantic war epic, “Atonement,” Tony Gilroy had the legal suspense drama, “Michael Clayton,” Paul Thomas Anderson had the majestic oil-and-blood greed-based drama, “There Will be Blood,” and then there was the Western-themed thriller by the Coen brothers, “No Country for Old Men.”Six months after winning best picture and director Oscars for “No Country for Old Men,” the duo is back with a new film, “Burn After Reading.”CIA Asian analyst Osborne Cox quits his job because he was demoted. To get revenge on the Agency, Cox decides to publish a tell-all memoir about his work experience.Unfortunately for Cox, this memoir gets lost and turns up with a Hardbodies gym employee, Chad Feldheimer. Feldheimer, part ambitious finder-keeper and part moronic Good Samaritan, realizes the worth of the information on his hands and decides to blackmail Cox. This provides the main conflict in the film, resulting in actions and consequences no viewer can anticipate.The film is genuinely funny, sustained by its grim humor and   outrageous predicament.It could be seen as a commentary on the ineptitude of American intelligence agencies — in the beginning, the Agency erred by firing Cox and by the end of the film it remained absolutely clueless. Since nothing could be explained, they learned nothing — not a very subtle lesson in these time, nevertheless very effective.This film features a stellar ensemble cast — Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Richard Jenkins and John Malkovich — and a couple of recognizable bit players. For the most part, the cast embraces the idiocy written into their roles. Pitt bobs his head to an inaudible tune streaming from his iPod, breathlessly repeating “Osborne Coooxx.” Clooney, wide-eyed, exudes conflicted manliness but restrains his suaveness, and Malkovich snarls like a famished Bullmastiff in heat, and is as usual a familiar delight.But the ability to display exaggerated mannerisms is not the same as acting — if not, new parents making funny faces would fill the lots in Hollywood.In a sense then, “Burn After Reading” resembles Stephen           Soderbergh’s “Ocean” series.In the “Ocean” movies, a bunch of guys hung out together and decided to have fun onscreen, oblivious to the fact that audiences get bored when comedians laugh at their own jokes.Also, like the “Ocean” series, “Burn After Reading” is the honey mustard sandwiched between more crucial projects in the director’s schedules.The main problem with “Burn after Reading” is its lack of new ideas — the dearth of progression in the work of the directors. The Coens’ have halted because they have drawn the last drop of inspiration from the well of their absurdist worldview.The Coens’ film motifs are built on outrageous actions triggered by incomplete or inaccurate information, cheating spouses and ransoms from blackmail or kidnappings.In their first film, “Blood Simple,” an assassin is hired by a cuckolded husband to kill his wife and her lover. The hitman doesn’t carry out the assignment. Instead he  collects the bounty, kills the husband, before proceeding to kill the lover.The wife is unaware her husband is dead, so she believes him to be killer. The film ends with her killing the hitman, content in her ignorance.In “Fargo,” a man in financial trouble hatches a plan with two criminals to kidnap his wife and collect $1 million from her wealthy father. Through a series of unfortunate incidents, several people are killed and the crime is traced back to the kidnappers. The movie ends with more people getting offed, the husband getting arrested and the loot getting lost in a snowy desert.Another one of their films, “The Man Who Wasn’t There” deals with an impoverished barber who wants to improve his fortune through a shady financial investment. To get the seed capital, he blackmails his wife’s boss, who incidentally had been sleeping with his wife.The barber kills the boss, but the wife is arrested as the suspect for the murder. She is acquitted, though not before she kills herself. The barber is finally arrested and sentenced for the murder of another man — one he did not kill.Almost all their films have themes similar to these. The Coen’s cinematic landscape is littered with the bodies of hapless adulterers and miserable con-men.”Burn After Reading” is no different from its progenitors. The opening is a giveaway — a satellite image of the shadowy globe zooms in to Washington D.C. — creating a sense of the locale, a control system where nature operates according to entropy.The final shot, similar to the opening shot, is a dare. By zooming away from D.C. to the globe, the point is made that events like these could happen anywhere.It is not necessary to ask if “Burn After Reading” is any good — it is. The more important question is if it is enough. And it appears not to be. The Coen brothers are veritable filmmakers, but while their early films were a refreshing mélange of film noir, screwball comedy and suspense, their latest now seems a stale concoction lacking fizz. —-contact Freke Ette at [email protected]