Review: The Informant!

Supposedly based on a true story, a moustachioed and nerdy Matt Damon plays a mild-mannered biochemist and VP at an Illinois agricultural company specialising in adding lysine to its products. One day he discovers a mole in the company who is selling them out to the Japanese. So the FBI are called in, and Damon tries to help them out. He also tells the FBI (represented by Scott Bakula and a wasted Joel McHale) that the company is involved in price-fixing, and soon they have him acting as an informant/spy for them against his own company. However, one soon starts to question Damon’s motives in all of this, and possibly even more than his motives. Melanie Lynskey is Damon’s wife, while Clancy Brown has a small role as one of Damon’s superiors.

 

Although Matt Damon gives a commendable and interestingly milquetoast performance in the lead, I simply never got on the wavelength of this 2009 film from aloof director Steven Soderbergh (“sex, lies, and videotape”, “Ocean’s Eleven”) and screenwriter Scott Z. Burns (“Contagion”, another Soderbergh film that left me cold). Based on a book by Kurt Eichenwald, it’s a film about a meek guy with a seriously uninteresting occupation, who engages in criminal activities that are similarly dry and uninteresting. Price-fixing? Wire-tapping? Corn? ZZZZzzzzz. And why in the hell is there so much dodgy stuff going on in such a boring, harmless industry? Stupid.

 

Damon’s seemingly irrelevant narration, meanwhile is a corny and unfunny joke, not to mention infuriating given one could really use a helpful narrator to wade through all this business-related stuff that largely went over my head. This results in a film that fails to draw you into its story, despite the lead character himself being quite fascinating the more you get to know him. The film gets better as the bullshit façade of Matt Damon’s character starts to slip, but even then you can’t help feeling that a) “Catch Me If You Can” did this better, and b) There was a better way to tell this story without it being so dry and confusing in the first half. The crimes committed are boring, the guy committing them is fascinating. Soderbergh and Burns seem to have missed this, and also seem to be so amused with themselves that they’ve forgotten to tell the story in a way that helps draw us in as well. Also, for a film supposedly set in the early 90s, it looks and sounds like it’s taking place in the 60s. Yes, this means we get an hilariously jaunty Marvin Hamlisch (“The Sting”, “The Way We Were”) score, but it also has you seriously confused about when and where the hell we are in time. I was already largely confused about what the hell the story was all about, at least in the first half.

 

Damon’s good, and Scott Bakula gives one of his best performances…but what does that say? No, this one did nothing much for me at all (I’m sure Soderbergh fans will adore it), and Soderbergh’s refusal to invite the audience along for the ride is seriously annoying and counter-productive. I don’t want to be spoon-fed, but Soderbergh and Burns do themselves a disservice by making this so damn difficult to get into. But what do you expect from a filmmaker who gives us the following disclaimer at the start: ‘While this motion picture is based on real events, certain incidents and characters are composites, and dialog has been dramatized. So there’. That’s the equivalent of saying ‘We read the true story and then made our own story up…‘coz.’

 

Rating: C