Matt Damon is The Informant!

All I wanted to see of Steven Soderbergh's The Informant was what was advertised: a wacky, hapless executive so clueless about the ways of surveillance that it bordered on outright stupidity a la The Man Who Knew Too Little. Instead, I got a mildly amusing movie about an embezzling chronic liar who maybe is schizophrenic, or maybe is just an asshole.

The Informant takes place over the span of what must have been the most boring four year investigation of two FBI agent's lives. Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is vice president of ADM, the least exciting company on the face of the planet. His company produces Lycene, which he'll tell you via inner monologue is in every food you eat, and ADM and other Lycene producers are price fixing in order to raise the prices on their products for a higher profit. Special Agents Shepherd (Scott Bakula) and Herndon (Joel McHale) recruit Mark to be a wired insider at price fixing meetings between ADM and their foreign competitors.

Unfortunately, none of it is as fun as was advertised and the movie itself constantly toed the line between 'amusing enough' and 'enough already'. While The Informant has an air of entertainment to it, a lot of it is forced on you via the soundtrack. The 1950's Susie Homemaker music dropped on top of everything made it seem like Soderbergh knew his movie wasn't quite as funny as he wanted it to be so he slapped this stuff in there to try and brighten it up a little. It was the equivalent of putting Benny Hill music over a video you're about to post on youtube that isn't that funny, but in all cases the music will make it funnier.

The movie is pretty well written. Not unlike most Steven Soderbergh movies, it has a wit and sharpness that most comedies sacrifice for fart jokes and slapstick. I don't mean to say that the script is 100% awesome though. While it is a good script, it didn't do a great job of reeling me in with the subject matter. I do have to give screenwriter Scott Burns credit for making it as entertaining as it was, but since this was taken from a true story there is a max entertainment value that you can squeeze out of the content and, for me anyways, it wasn't quite enough to make it an excellent movie.

Soderbergh should probably issue a press release to the world, or at least to everyone who sees this movie in order to remind them to NOT HATE Matt Damon after this. Not because he was bad, but because he was a pretty impressive asshole throughout The Informant, much in the same vein as Marcia Gay Harden in The Mist. Saying their characters are hateable is a devastating understatement, but the actors do such a great job playing them, pulling on your hate strings for 2 hours at a time, making it incredibly difficult to separate the actor from the character. Comparing him to Marcia Gay Harden is maybe a little extreme as she is possibly the most hateable character in history, but by the end of The Informant, every lovable quality about Mark Whitacre is broken by how much of a lying douche he is.

Soderbergh has a style that he uses when he films his Ocean's flicks which appears here to some extent, but The Informant didn't really call for it as much as those ones did and I applaud him for dialing it back a little bit. He still finds a way to do a lot with color and light which gives the movie a nice bit of surrealism that I thought played well with the characters.

If nothing else, The Informant is well acted, and very well filmed. Where it is lacking is its content which was spread out over way too long of a timeline and not really all that exciting in the first place. Good cast, bland story, mediocre comedy.

3 stars

Comments

[Aaron]

nice review. 'informative' no pun intended ;). I was a little iffy on this movie to begin with but your review reassures my assumptions.

[Will LeBlanc]

It's definitely not a bad movie and I can see why people would enjoy it, it just wasn't for me. I'll give it another shot on DVD and see how that goes. Thanks for the comment. Keep reading!

[Anng]

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