Matt Damon, bulked up to look like John Candy's little brother doing a biopic of Sam Allardyce, gives it his all in the main role. Sadly giving it his all involves a lot of bemused standing around with his mouth gaping wide open like a Sesame Street puppet. But I can forgive anyone who tries.
Soderbergh, the director, doesn't pace the film well at all. Though a lot of story is necessarily kept for the fall-out in the last half an hour, that doesn't mean it has to drag for the first hour. The Informant! needed to be altogether more zippy. Added to that, the last half hour with its constant further revelations and mini-twists was little short of confused and that didn't work either. But there was a spell about three quarters of the way in that the film really got going and for a while it was great.
There's not a lot else to say really. It's mediocre but with promise. It probably suffers from being the last of a run of similar films. The best thing about the whole thing is sitcom regular Tony Hale's cameo as Damon's first lawyer. That's him below with Matt Damon. Aside from that, Scott Bakula is quietly capable as the lead FBI agent but his resemblence to the latter-years Mr Spock is off-putting, it's nice to see Back To The Future's Biff Tannen back in a big film (he's good actually) and the score has some nice nods to other spy capers in parts. Sadly the constant Matt Damon voice-over, which was actually one of the cleverest things about the script, is nonetheless irritating in the extreme. The word I used earlier was mediocre. And it is.
