Coen brothers' spy lark

The screen reads "CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia," and the footfalls of spooks in suits resound on the soundtrack - heels clicking down the gleaming corridors like tap dancers in slow motion, or ice cubes in a glass of Scotch.

And so begins the Coen brothers' ricocheting spy spoof/sex farce/midlife crisis comedy, Burn After Reading. And speaking of Scotch: Osborne Cox, a veteran analyst on Langley's Balkans desk, has just been told to retire. He's a drunk, his higher-ups say. At which point John Malkovich, in his rumpled Brooks Brothers - and in high dudgeon, playing this bow-tied CIA guy, Cox - goes ballistic. He makes sour jokes about Mormons (his boss, David Rasche, is one) and drops the F-bomb like a nuclear holocaust.

A far cry from Joel and Ethan Coen's haunting, high-caliber No Country for Old Men, the filmmaking siblings' Burn After Reading is a goofy screwball romp that affords a gaggle of A-listers the chance to hambone around in antic style: Brad Pitt gets a funny name - Chad Feldheimer - and funnier hair, in the role of a Washington fitness instructor. Frances McDormand is Linda Litzke, Chad's coworker, desperate for extra money for cosmetic surgery. George Clooney mugs it up as Harry Pfarrer, a federal marshal and a sex addict. And Tilda Swinton, a doctor, is married to Cox, but sleeping with Harry.

The paths cross, and double-cross. Richard Jenkins gets face time - and considerably more - as Chad and Linda's boss. And veteran character actor J.K. Simmons delivers a series of deadpan musings as a CIA bigwig baffled by what's happening around him.

Which is: Chad and Linda discover a computer disk at the gym that looks to be a top-secret CIA document. They conspire to extort Cox, author of the document, and threaten to sell the disk to the Russians if he doesn't pay. Meetings on park benches ensue - although most of these have to do with Internet dating, not espionage.

Paced like Preston Sturges, but with moments of jolting violence, and with a plot that doesn't really add up (it doesn't seem to want to), Burn After Reading is at its snappiest in the scenes with Malkovich. The actor, alternately ranting like a loon and sulking around his townhouse, bath-robed, drink in hand, couldn't be more pathetic and contemptible - and funny.