Ill Informed

I went to the theater twice today to catch a pair of movies that opened this weekend. But I'm actually going to talk about the second one I saw first, as perhaps a "cautionary tale," a service in the hopes of stopping others from stepping into the trap that caught me.

I'm talking about the new movie The Informant! (The exclamation point is officially part of the title.) It's the latest from director Steven Soderbergh, starring Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, and Joel McHale. From the trailer, it looks like a quirky little comedy about a clueless executive who decides to turn informant on his company to the FBI. Hilarity ensues.

It turns out that the movie is scarcely about the price fixing scheme the FBI is investigating. It's really a study of the character played by Matt Damon, a possibly bipolar, possible pathological man who perpetrates even more crimes of his own. The biggest fraud in the film is that committed against the audience, led to believe this is a comedy. If it is, then it's not a funny one.

The movie gets stranger as it rolls along, peeling back more layers of Damon's character -- stranger, but not necessarily more interesting. Largely that's a matter of my thwarted expectations, but it also stems from the fact that none of the other characters in the film are ever really fleshed out. They're all just talking, walking props for Matt Damon to act with.

The thing is, he does give a good performance. It goes beyond the physical transformation that all the talk shows and entertainment magazines are focused on. (If you haven't heard, he fattened up like a Thanksgiving turkey and gained 30 pounds for the role.) He really does justice to a man who is physiologically incapable of telling the truth. He also does a great job as the film's narrator. Good voice-over work can make or break a film. That might not quite be the case here, as the film was already "broken" in my view, but Matt Damon does inject some life into the film through his narration.

Perhaps another problem I had with the movie is an issue unfair to criticize it for: embezzlement turned out to play a big role in the story. In short, I felt on some level as though I was watching the biography of the man who stole millions of dollars from my former employer. Not entertaining in my book, especially not when I came to the theater expecting to see some kind of unlikely hero.

In any case, I think the only reason to see this movie is that you're a huge Matt Damon fan. Or a fan of "huge Matt Damon." (What I did there is probably funnier than anything actually in the movie.) I rate it a D+ on the strength of that good performance. Otherwise, it's a clunker.