James Reviews The Informant!
Maybe I should not have listened to the This American LIfe episode on the topic beforehand. Still other movies whose endings I knew already entertained me more than The Informant! did.
The movie was not funny or tragic enough. This story is nothing if not a comedy of errors, but the movie had only two or three moments that made me chuckle, and none that earned a genuine laugh. With this material, they should have been able to do more.
It's also a story of this tragic guy who engages in a lot of self-destructive behavior. While the awkwardness of watching this definitely comes across, Whitacre's character ends up being too despicable to sympathize with. They say as much in the episode on TAL. The movie lacks any sense of drama, leaping from point to point in the story with no connection to anything we care about.
So you're left with a sort of bland nothingness throughout the entire movie. Whitacre's flow-breaking unfunny internal monologues don't help. Worse, you watch a lot of the movie in back rooms and through secret cameras. As much as price-fixing sounds boring, I thought that they distanced the action of the movie too much from that, instead focusing on the investigation and preventing us from developing a real sense of what it was the ADM was doing wrong.
This is the first movie in a long time I considered walking out of. I would have if Sie Deen hadn't been there claiming she was interested. Little did I know she experiencing loss aversion or we could have been out of there an hour earlier.
My advice is to save yourself some money and listen to the episode of This American Life. Kick them a buck or two to pay for your bandwidth and twenty other people's and you'll have saved yourself half an hour of driving to and from the theatre, half the length of the movie (since the episode is forty five minutes shorter), and you'll have had a much better experience.
1.5/4
