Joel and Ethan Coen call upon a heavyweight cast of regular collaborators (George Clooney, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins) and newcomers to the Coen repertory group (Brad Pitt, John Malkovich, Tilda Swinton) for their follow-up to the Oscar-winning No Country For Old Men. And then the brothers gleefully despatch half of their stars in a hail of bullets and blunt weapons.

This is the Coens’ first self-penned original screenplay since The Man Who Wasn’t There in 2001, and it has in common with some of their earlier pictures, specifically Raising Arizona and Fargo, a savagely comic taste for creative violence and a slightly mocking eye for detail. It also shares with these films one of the Coen Brothers preferred themes: that of inept criminals, or more specifically the ordinary Joe who thinks he or she can pull off one ingenious heist that will turn their luck around.

It’s hard to think of anyone less suited to a life of crime than Pitt’s character Chad. Most toddlers have better extortion skills. Chad is a bouncing puppy of a man; a fitness trainer at Hard Bodies gym and the best buddy of fellow Hard Bodies employee Linda (McDormand). Linda has an aching loneliness inside which she attempts to fill with unrewarding hook ups on internet dating sites and the dream of a new life bought through extensive cosmetic surgery. But all the butt-sculpting and face-stretching that she requires comes at a price, so when the gym cleaner finds a disk that appears to contain what Chad describes as “top secret sensitive shit”, Linda scents the chance of a windfall and Chad skips happily along beside her.

The disk in fact contains the whiskey-sodden ramblings that former CIA agent Osbourne Cox (Malkovich, who ties with Pitt for the film’s funniest performance) considers to be the beginnings of his memoir. Cox is struggling from the wreckage of a motorway pile-up of personal crises – he has quit his job, his wife (Swinton, delivering her lines with a scrotum-shrivelling ferocity) is tired of him and two imbeciles are trying to blackmail him. Little does Cox know but his wife is having an affair with a man he despises: married family friend and federal marshal Harry (Clooney). And in a coincidence that only the Coen brothers are audacious enough to pull off, Harry is also seeing Linda, having met her while sleazing around internet dating sites.

Carter Burwell’s brilliant score is the most paranoid piece of film music since Quincy Jones’s neurotic soundtrack for The Anderson Tapes – it’s particularly well-judged as it brings a gravity to a collection of characters who we could otherwise dismiss as numbskulls and nincompoops. The attention to detail is impeccable: the Coens can even raise a laugh with something as simple as a well-placed photograph of Vladimir Putin (the Russian Prime Minister gazes down from wall at Pitt and McDormand with the murderous expression of a tiger shark about to chew its way through a mouth full of particularly stupid herrings).

If the film does lack something, it’s warmth. The affection you felt from the Coens for the misguided fools in Fargo or Raising Arizona is lacking here for everyone except Jenkins’ hapless and hopelessly love sick gym manager. And while the film carries the audience with its entertaining, if somewhat ludicrous, blend of high level espionage and ab-toning exercises, it would perhaps be more rewarding if we could like the characters as well as laugh at them.

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