Discover The Best Movies and TV Shows Like Burn After Reading

Set in Washington, D.C., *Burn After Reading* begins when bitter CIA analyst Osbourne Cox is demoted for his worsening alcoholism. Enraged, he abruptly resigns to write a tell-all memoir exposing agency secrets. Meanwhile, his chilly wife, Katie, is having an affair with Harry Pfarrer, a paranoid, married federal marshal. When Katie seeks a divorce, she copies Osbourne’s financial records and draft memoirs onto a CD-ROM, which accidentally ends up at Hardbodies, a vain, image-obsessed local gym.At the gym, self-absorbed personal trainer Chad Feldheimer and his surgically obsessed coworker, Linda Litzke, discover the disc. Mistaking the mundane financial statements for classified government espionage, Chad and Linda hatch a reckless blackmail scheme to fund Linda’s expensive cosmetic surgeries. Linda's primary motivation is desperate: she believes plastic surgery is the only path to finding true love through online dating.Chad approaches Osbourne at a park to return the "classified" data, but Osbourne flies into a rage and violently rejects him. Undeterred, Chad and Linda take the files to the Russian Embassy, hoping to sell secrets to the highest bidder. The Russian diplomats, utterly baffled and unimpressed by the incoherent ramblings of a disgruntled ex-bureaucrat, dismiss the pair, though an operative takes the CD-ROM just to humor them.Complications escalate wildly when Linda connects with Harry Pfarrer through an online dating site. Unbeknownst to Linda, Harry is already sleeping with Katie Cox. Harry and Linda begin an intense affair, completely unaware of their mutual connection to Osbourne. Concurrently, Chad, attempting to spy on Osbourne’s house, breaks in to gather more intelligence. He is caught inside by Harry, who panics and shoots Chad dead on the spot, believing him to be a foreign assassin.Meanwhile, a bewildered CIA superior, having monitored the absurd chain of events, tries to make sense of the chaos. He learns that Chad is dead, the Russians have the files (which contain nothing of actual value), and Linda has been abducted by the CIA to silence her. Desperate to secure her release and pay for her surgeries, Linda’s lovestruck friend and gym manager, Ted, tries to track her down, only to be murdered by Harry, who is fleeing the authorities. Harry is subsequently captured by the CIA.In the final debriefing, the exasperated CIA director reviews the entire fiasco. With utter detachment, he orders the dead bodies disposed of, pays for Linda’s cosmetic surgeries to keep her quiet, and agrees to ignore Osbourne’s embarrassing memoir. Ultimately, the film concludes with the intelligence agency realizing that the entire catastrophe involved no actual secrets, leaving them thoroughly baffled by the boundless stupidity of human nature.