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The Informant

You don’t need a Hollywood informant to tell you that a great actor like Matt Damon and great director like Steven Soderbergh are not enough to make a successful flick. You must start with good material.

Structure/Plot and Character

In all fairness, by the end of the story some interesting elements were apparent, how Damon was bi-polar and built one lie on top of another going back to the very first one of the extortion-virus scheme. The problem is that this interest came way too late.

The first downer for me was the discrepency between Damon’s voice-over thoughts and his personality. That it made sense by the end because of his illness was irrelevant, it was awkward and irritating as first presented and that did not help to create empathy for the character. He was engaging and fun when he was wearing a wire trying to get the price-fixing scheme on tape and that should have been his tone throughout the movie.

The more serious downer was around 17 minutes in. That’s when Damon and his wife were panicing over the extortion scheme, only their words were considerably ahead of the audience’s knowledge at the time and that made it confusing. The story started simple enough and then suddenly became unnecessarily twisted.

It got worse from there…first it was the extortion scheme and then Act II started when Damon pushed a new angle, the price-fixing investigation. And then just minutes later he wanted to back away from it, which halted the already uneven momentum. I was officially out of the movie at that point. That Damon ended up being a criminal who stole millions made me feel bad for caring about him even a little bit.

Stakes

In all the above, one glaring absence was the lack of stakes for Damon. There was pressure on him at work because of the delays in the lysene production, but there was no sense that his job was on the line nor even that the delays were his fault. (And obviously there was no sense early on of his thievery catching up to him.)

I feel a couple of tweaks could have started this story on a better path and led to a more engaging movie. One, Damon’s boss should have been nasty towards him and threatened his job because of the lysene hiccups and then we should have seen the potential negative consequences to him getting fired- mounting bills at home or his wife threatening to leave him or any other Important Thing.

Two, Damon should have started with the price-fixing allegation and stuck with it for longer. Then the FBI would have gradually uncovered the newly- formed extortion plot…creating much drama as Damon works with them on the one hand and has to protect himself from them on the other. There are obviously many details to this, but I only have patience for the general flow. That this would have adulterated some of the true events the movie is based on is not important.

Three…I’m not certain about this…I would have revealed Damon’s mental condition early on. That he was succeeding in life despite it would have created empathy for him. And, with the above objective to save his job and family, it would not have been obvious at first that the lies were part of his being. Ultimately, I needed to care for this guy and root for him to beat his bosses and their illegal activities. Only then would I have stayed on emotionally for the twist of him being a criminal.

Casting

I came back to add this part as I forgot it at first. I hated the stunt casting of around five comedians and comic actors. I’m sure even people who didn’t recognize them felt a weird vibe by their presence.

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