THE INFORMANT! Bloody good fun!

THE INFORMANT! is based on a true story but refuses to be bound by the facts. That's the general gist of the disclaimer which appears right at the start of the film. It's such a crazy story that it's hard to believe it actually happened. Stylistically it's a companion-piece to 2008's "Burn After Reading" but content-wise it's closer to Russell Crowe's 1999 true-story epic "The Insider."
Matt Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, an Ivy League PhD scientist and rising star at Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) in the early 1990s. ADM is an agri-industry giant manufacturing many of the additives, preservatives and sundry chemicals listed in small print on the ingredients section of food packaging. Motivated, he says, by a sense of moral outrage, Whitacre contacts the FBI to blow the whistle on ADM's efforts to fix the world price of the food supplement, lysine, and for the next 3 years he leads a double-life as an undercover informant gathering evidence on his colleagues. It became the biggest anti-trust case the FBI had ever handled and resulted in the downfall not only of ADM's senior management but also - for very unexpected reasons - Mark Whitacre himself.
What starts out as a comedy-tinged caper, punctuated by a wonderfully jaunty score from Marvin Hamlisch, turns out to be something very different indeed. Director Steven Soderbergh oversees a story that peels like an onion revealing layer after layer of twists and turns which keep us constantly wrongfooted. Are we watching a comedy, a drama, a tragedy or something that's a combination of the three but isn't a dragemedy? Can this real life guy Whitacre be for real? Can we take him seriously when he comes across like a close cousin of Damon's dorky character Linus Caldwell in the "Ocean's 11/12/13" movies?
The ride is wild, the story's fascinating, and the performances are spot on - Joel McHale - from E!'s The Soup - and Scott Bakula are stand-out as Whitacre's FBI handlers. The result is total entertainment. THE INFORMANT! really is a whole lot of fun!