The Informant

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writers: Scott Z. Burns, Kurt Eichenwald
Starring: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula
Release Date: September 18, 2009
Length: 1 hour 17 minutes

You can believe it’s Matt Damon, but you can’t believe its only 1 hour and 45 minutes, when it feels like 2 and a half. Matt Damon is Mark Witacre, an executive at the company, Archer Daniels Midland in Decatur, Illinois in the early 1990’s. Mark is married to Ginger played by Melanie Lynskey and has 3 kids. With his wife’s persuasion, Mark decides to confess to FBI agent, Brian Sheppard about secret price-fixing going on at the company, with one of their products. The FBI advises Mark to do some investigating within the company and soon enough Mark has recorded thousands of video and audiotapes to give to the FBI. He travels to different cities around the world to look into the company’s activity in these meetings. Eventually, he has enough to establish an invasion within the company. As much as it’s hard to believe, Matt Damon with the extra 30 pounds can’t be the reason this film got such hype. It also can’t be the reason people liked it because you forget that it’s Matt Damon within the first 5 minutes, or even less if you have seen the trailers and are already used to this character. For the first 40 minutes (or what seemed to be at least), while the film was establishing the storyline and characters, I was very bored and the introduction was much too long. Once the plot started to pick up the pace, my attention was drawn back to the film. I was happily surprised in some scenes when Matt Damon’s voice would cut in to the scene, giving random fun facts about whatever’s on his mind. I found them oddly funny at first, but they started to get repetitive after a while and the humor from them faded. I have to admit there were some funny scenes, but there were also some scenes that dragged. The informant has its odd quirks but it’s not a comedy. As much as this film was hyped up because of Matt Damon not looking like…well, Matt Damon, I do not believe it is worth your 12 bucks. If you really want to see this film (like I did), it’s still a solid movie, but you will be slightly disappointed. The Informant wasn’t as great as I thought it would be, but still a likable film.