Damon: "Hey darlin', I'll be late home tonight, can you Tivo Jedward's performance for me please?"

Cast: Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynsky
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Screenwriters: Scott Z Burns (screenplay), Kurt Eichenwald (novel)

Matt Damon re-teams with Steven Soderbergh for this dark comedy about the conspiratorial, behind closed doors, shenanigans of big business. Damon is Mark Whitacre, a high ranking executive at pan-global conglomerate ADM who turns his back on $350,000 a year to become an informant to the FBI, recording hundreds of hours of evidence of the company’s shady dealing, price fixing, and general all-round rule-bending and law-flaunting. The self-styled 0014 (cos he’s twice as smart as Bond) though is not as sure a bet for the Feds as initially appears, mostly on account of him being a unpredictable, compulsive liar who churns out ever-changing tales as if storytelling was going out of fashion. Not just is he a believer in the notion that the best lies are founded on a grain of truth, but he is also a fully-paid up subscriber to the thinking that sometimes the best lies are the ones that have not a single grain of truth to them at all, the ones whisked out of thin air composed of nothing other than deceit.

Self-serving, dishonest, manipulative, bungling, glory-hunting not to mention boasting at least some sort of detachment from real world logic, Whitacre looks not just to bring down the house of cards though. Rather he is assuming that once the ill-doers are brought to justice the company can resume business with his job secure and him lauded as a hero, or maybe, even better, with him getting a promotion to top dog, despite it being put to him that the case will bring about a change in “the corporate culture.� Whitacre though, despite his perceived numerical superiority, is no master spy; he narrates the audio-tapes as he walks through the lion’s den of the ADM headquarters, he bundles around with briefcase-concealed recording gear, fumbling, stumbling and bumbling at every conceivable turn. Less Bond and more Austin Powers, only without any discernible ‘mojo’ to speak of. That’s not to say though that he doesn’t on occasion get the job done, when he’s not wrapped up in his own self-promotion or weaving an intricate and monstrously meandering web of lies.

Big business, greedy money-men, the total takeover of corporations and their ability to dictate a self-serving rulebook, this is land ripe for comedy, not least because often the numbers involved, the scale of the deception, and the staggering appetite for ‘capital’ would be downright hilarious if it weren’t for the fact it was true. And so it is sad that, despite being adapted from Eichenwald’s real-life account of ADM’s indiscretions, The Informant! misses a trick. It’s not daft enough to be a farce, nor biting enough to be satire, instead it sits in a perplexing middle ground, swinging in both directions but never landing any real blows. A muddled and sea-sawing tone doesn’t help and often Whitacre’s outlandishness puts him at odds with those around him – friends, family and colleagues – almost as if Inspector Clouseau has walked in straight off a pink panther case with no one remembering to tell him, or to tell anyone else involved in the case, or the film for that matter too. It also suffers from a lack of direction and comes across more as a procession of scenes in which dumbfounded Feds and official lawmen-types react with drop-jawed bafflement and bewilderment at Whitacre’s ever-increasing infidelities, misinformation and exasperating self-delusion.

Despite this whirlpool of ideas and thematic approaches, The Informant! has enough to pass muster as a smirksome tale. Damon is good value as the moustached, decidedly girthsome exec-turned-rat, multiple Oscar winner Marvin Hamlisch’s score captures the light-footed, playful and yet absurd tone of the film better than the film does itself, and Soderbergh wins pints for the suggestion that everything might not be entirely as it seems, even in the end. It’s just that his film sits on the fence being neither a razor-sharp indictment of the greed-driven follies of geekish, dollar-obsessed society nor an outlandish tale of corporate espionage gone awry.

The Informant! is in cinemas now via Warner Bros

By Alasdair Morton