Fridae

In a world without Steven Soderbergh, The Informant! would be either be a well-meaning but boring documentary about one of the largest corporate frauds in history, a middling television biopic of the whistle-blower Mark Whitacre, or a shrill and snarky indictment of global capitalism made by Michael Moore – and the world would be poorer for it.

In the hands of Steven Soderbergh, The Informant! is a clever spin on the spy thriller as a comedy of errors. Soderbergh’s conceit has Mark Whitacre (played by an almost unrecognisable Matt Damon) as a self-styled corporate spy for the FBI, snitching on his corrupt, price-fixing bosses at the Archer Daniels Midland Company – while playing both sides, comically ineptly.

The spy thriller revolves around a dupe or a fool who reveals himself as the sharpest razor in the toolshed. The Informant!, as a spy comedy, as a spy comedy of errors, revolves around an average man of limited intelligence and limited self-awareness thinking he is the sharpest razor in the toolshed, playing at being a spy. Where the spy drama revolves around information that may or may not be reliable, the charm of this movie lies in guessing just how much information is unreliable precisely because the spy in question is unreliable.

The fun of watching this movie rests of Matt Damon’s take on Mark Whitacre. His portrayal of the flawed hero is strangely endearing and charming, even when Whitacre is clearly the butt of the joke – a middle-town American who has no idea of "spies" aside from how cool it looks in the movies, a spy who is completely mistaken about his role in the grand scheme of things and drives everyone up the wall. In some ways, Matt Damon’s character is similar to Brad Pitt’s in Burn After Reading, but his is a character you can in some way feel for, despite his intellectual inadequacies.

Fans of the spy genre will appreciate Soderbergh’s attention to details, and his upending of just about every spy movie convention you can think of. This spy comedy is more funny and brilliant than say Get Smart or Burn After Reading.