MOVIE REVIEW: ‘THE INFORMANT!‘
“The Informant!“
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenplay: Scott Burns
TRT: 108 minutes (R) For Language
Cast
Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre
Scott Bakula as FBI Special Agent Brian Shepherd
Joel McHale as FBI Special Agent Bob Herndon
Melanie Lynskey as Ginger Whitacre
Thomas F. Wilson as Mark Cheviron
Rick Overton as Terry Wilson
Tom Papa as Mick Andreas
Peacock Feathers (3 out of 5)
By Marcus Thorpe
Movie audiences love the “sexy” in movies. Julia Roberts or Clive Owen in a leading role is sexy. A unique idea like “The Matrix” is sexy. A villain like Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs” is sexy. There is not much sexy about lysine price-fixing in Decatur, Illinois. Still, Steven Soderbergh does his best to take Matt Damon, make him the informant, and at least make it mildly attractive.
“The Informant” takes place in a spot many of you have never heard about, Decatur, Illinois. And at a company many of you have never heard about, Archer Daniels Midland. But as you find out right away, a majority of the things you eat on a semi-regular basis has something ADM has a hand in. They make a lot of money doing it to, and have some very smart people leading the charge. In the early 1990s one of those people was Mark Whitacre. A genius of sorts, and a rising star in the ADM hierarchy. He is a man with a very normal life, a wife, children, but a ton of money. His wife does not do without, he does not do without, but there is something missing, excitement, mystery, espionage. That all changes when Mark Whitacre decides to blow the whistle on one of the biggest corporate fraud cases on record. And the whistle just keeps on blowing, and for one reason, Whitacre just can’t keep his mouth shut!
Damon takes on one of his blandest characters. You won’t get Jason Bourne, or Linus from the Ocean’s films, you get an inside look at a man whose mind is always working. Whitacre’s internal and external dialogue is sharp, random, funny, and sad all at the same time. He knows corn, he knows numbers, he knows what he’s asked to do, and he knows something is not on the up and up at ADM. His biggest supporters and eventually some of his biggest enemies come in the hands of the FBI agents. Presented by the underwhelming Scott Bakula and Joel McHale, this is where the story line becomes a bit flat. The lines stop coming fast and furious once we get Whitacre to shut up for a few minutes. The agents just can’t keep up with the Soderbergh break-neck pace. Speaking of the direction from Soderbergh, I think he does some fine work here. The mundane music in-between Damon’s walking in and out of the building. The scenes where Whitacre is walking into uncharted territory as a spy hits the mark almost every time. I just think there comes a point where you want the lies to stop, you want the story line to move.
I may have liked this movie a bit more than you will: I lived in Decatur for 7 years, I recognized many of the shooting spots throughout the film, there were plenty of familiar faces (craig, scot, tara, ken, tim, karen, and others) that I used to work with, and a story I was pretty familiar with. Mark Whitacre shined a big light on a big problem, he benefited by taking in $9 million of his own through illegal ways. Sexy it is not, solid it is.
MT
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on 09/21 at 08:29 PM
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