The A.V. Club
In the last scene of the Coen brothers’ comedy Burn After Reading, a CIA desk-jockey played by J.K. Simmons gets briefed on a series of inexplicable mishaps that has left multiple civilians dead at the hands of government employees. After making sure the bodies are buried and that all necessary parties have been paid off, the boss sighs, “What have we learned? I don’t fuckin’ know.” It’d be a stretch to call (T)error the documentary version of Burn After Reading. (For one thing, there’s nothing funny about it.) But it’s similarly despairing about whether the people in charge of running covert operations know what’s happening out in the field—and whether they care if they’re wasting the taxpayers’ money.
