Review of The Informant (2008) by Michael Y — 24 Mar 2011

Conspiracies and illegal activities within a company, this true story about a man's involvement with the FBI starts off boreish, yet quirky, but turnes into something unexpected that makes it quite worth while.

Mark Whitacre is your average, hard working American in one of the biggest companies in the world, ADM. But Mark's attempt to fix a bug in the system leads him to discover the company's price-fixing conspiracy in it's international lysine market. Mark helps the FBI bring down the price-fixing and begins to rise to the top of his company. But there's much more to the conspiracy than Mark would let the FBI know. The Informant! is a story that weighs a complex business conspiracy with off-beat humor in the narroration. What looks like an uneven flow of pacing of a situation later becomes a creative angle for a story. Matt Damon plays his role very well, even if it's one that is not extremely expressive or likeable, but he plays well as a different kind of character.

It's hard to tell at first that you're watching a Steven Soderbergh movie. This movie is completely off-beat from the subject matter. This movie about conspiracies and FBI investigations and moles is useually dramatic or suspenceful subjectmatter, but not this movie. What seperates this movie from drama to comical is the choice of music. This movie really is made like a conspiracy drama, but the music makes it completely different. It developes this kind of old, James Bond, spy theme in which the main character sees himself as, a spy working for the FBI. The music really glorifies that feeling. But other than that, you can totally tell this is a Soderbergh movie. Distant shots, awkward drama, it's all noticable past the music. It's a weird mix, but not one that's necessarily done in a bad way, especially when it captures the '90s look of the business enviroment so well.

It's a weird look for a movie, but then again, it's about a very weird character. It's not an attention getter, but it's an interesting movie about an interesting and real situation about one crime after another and the man who is caught in it all.