Expectation is a prison. That being so, are you going to spend your time smoking dog-ends and trafficking phone cards, building matchstick pagodas, or maybe even working out how to escape? Having been awarded every gong going for No Country For Old Men, the Coen Brothers have brought us their new film, Burn After Reading.

There are artists in every field who reliably deliver just what their audiences want time after time. The Rolling Stones have been doing that for decades. And then there’s someone like Frank Zappa, who coached his band into doing a different show every night, and some of whose material emulated doo wop and blues without offering the emotional payoff that songs about being done wrong in love typically provide. For me, Zappa is much the more interesting artist, and in lieu of simplistic balms for the aches of life you get a wealth of intriguing musical experiments laced with a scabrous humour as identifiable as Frank’s moustache. And even dead, Zappa continues to be infinitely more interesting than the Stones, whose carcasses will probably strike E chords and pout when they’re six feet under.

Which brings us back to the new Coen brothers film. It starts off with a pull-in from space to the CIA headquarters, which any number of thrillers have made us aware are in Langley, Virginia. Accompanying the zoom is percussion-heavy synthesised music, the sort that you reliably get in techno-thrillers. All of which sets us up for Burn After Reading to be a sleek and shiny techno-thriller itself.

But of course, it isn’t. This is the Coens we’re talking about, and they have as much interest in delivering a mainstream action film as Zappa did in doing straight covers of Howling Wolf. What we get instead, is a potty-mouthed exploration of nothing in particular, as CIA agents and gym employees alike get involved in a hunt for a missing disk of computer data, and become all tangled up in each others’ lives as they do.

You’ll know already if that’s something you might find entertaining in the hands of Joel and Ethan Coen. If it’s not…well, you’ll get mighty frustrated waiting for global conspiracies and climactic action scenes, because as much as the photography and music cues you to expect them, they ain’t coming.

So, have the Coens set out to piss their audience off? Well, depends how you look at it. Their fascination this time round is with conjuring a film in which there’s not a whole lot at stake. And that’s not playing fair, basically. The fact that the likes of George Clooney and John Malkovich and Brad Pitt are involved in this unwinding yarn, and that their characters are just as convinced as the audience that Something Big is round the corner, just goes to show how dumb people are waiting for Significant Moments to appear when they could be just enjoying what’s happening right now for the sheer hell of it. A few moments of poignancy within the film indicate that this was indeed a possibility for its characters, one they’ve overlooked in favour of shooting for the moon.

If nothing else, you’ve got to admire the sheer cojones of the brothers for foisting a film like this on audiences when any number of strategists would have been telling them to follow up No Country For Old Men with something pretty much in the same vein. But that’s not the way the Coens roll, and is just another reason I’ll continue to follow their wayward path to see what captivates them next time round.