Directed by
Steven Soderbergh
108 minutes
Rated M
Reviewed by
Andrew Lee
The Informant!
Synopsis: Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is a bio-chemist turned divisional president at Archer Daniels Midland, a company that produces all kinds of corn-derived products. A substance called Lysine is his baby however. When he claims to be being blackmailed by a Japanese competitor who is sabotaging his Lysine production, his bosses call in the FBI. And then Mark decides to confess to something much bigger. ADM have been price-fixing, which turns out to affect pretty much anyone who has ever eaten cereal for breakfast…This should be one of the most boring films ever produced. A senior executive confesses to fixing the price of Lysine. I mean, who’s even heard of Lysine? It’s an amino acid that gets put into just about everything you eat, and seriously, it’s boring subject matter. And a bunch of guys sitting in a room agreeing to fix the price a few cents up or down is not exactly on the same level as The Insider (1999). Unlike smoking, breakfast cereal won’t kill you. The setting isn’t exactly gonna set the world on fire either.
But The Informant! has an ace in the hole, Mark Whitacre is completely bugnuts crazy. A pathological liar, corrupt as anything, calculating and naïve in equal measure, he’s hysterical to watch. Steven Soderbergh’s film adroitly steps the line between laughing at him, and laughing at the situations he creates, so it never feels mean. Instead, you kinda love the guy, because he comes across as so innocent and childlike. His voiceover musing on random unrelated topics are laugh-out-loud funny too. Matt Damon really inhabits the role, wiping away any sense of star power in the casting. Scott Bakula as the hapless FBI Agent Brian Shepard does a great job of looking excited, confused and frustrated. Joel McHale as his partner, Bob Herndon, is kinda hard to take though. His work on E!’s The Soup, where he trash-talks the pop culture of the week, makes it hard to accept him in a serious role. Even if you’ve never seen that program, he’ll probably still feel unconvincing. But that may just be due to the fact that “normal” people in this film feel underdone in comparison to the over-the-top nature of Mark Whitacre.
The Informant! is a very odd beast. Bathed in a soft orange glow and looking like a 60’s spy spoof, with music that roams from James Bond to Get Smart, it’s almost trying too hard to be funny. For the most part it doesn’t detract from the experience, but occasionally you get a sense of desperation from the film, as if it’s screaming at you to recognise how funny it is. Those moments are thankfully few, and for the most part the story itself has you laughing at how ridiculous the situation becomes, and how truly manipulative Mark is. It’s a funny film, and as the twists and turns become even more bizarre you’ll struggle to believe this is all based on a true story. But it is, and as it turns out, the price fixing of amino acids derived from corn really can form the basis of an entertaining story.
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