Movie · 2009 · Drama, Comedy, Crime · 1h 48m · R · English
Curator score: 4.7/10 (70.7K ratings)
Based on a tattle-tale
Overview
A rising star at agri-industry giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM), Mark Whitacre suddenly turns whistleblower. Even as he exposes his company’s multi-national price-fixing conspiracy to the FBI, Whitacre envisions himself being hailed as a hero of the common man and handed a promotion.
Ratings
Curator score: 4.7/10
IMDb: 6.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes: 79%
Metacritic: 66
TMDB: 6.2/10
Director
Steven Soderbergh
Production
Warner Bros. Pictures, Participant, Groundswell Productions, Section Eight, Jaffe/Braunstein Enterprise
Cast
Matt Damon, Scott Bakula, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey, Tom Papa, Rick Overton, Thomas F. Wilson, Clancy Brown, Tony Hale, Richard Steven Horvitz, Ann Cusack, Allan Havey, Rusty Schwimmer, Lucas McHugh Carroll, Eddie Jemison, Craig Ricci Shaynak, Scott Adsit, Ann Dowd, Howie Johnson, Nick Craig
Curator Review
Verdict
A sharp, off-kilter corporate-crime comedy that turns a real whistleblower scandal into a study of self-delusion, paranoia, and absurd bureaucracy. It’s especially rewarding if you like deadpan narration, tonal weirdness, and films that are funny right up until they become unsettling.
Best for
Viewers who enjoy dark comedies with a true-crime backbone
Fans of unreliable narrators and psychological unraveling
People who like corporate satire and antihero stories
Soderbergh admirers looking for one of his strangest mainstream films
Skip if
You want a straightforward whistleblower drama
You dislike tonal shifts between comedy and tragedy
You prefer clear, emotionally grounded protagonists
You need fast, conventional plotting
Overview
The Informant! is one of those movies that seems to be operating on a frequency all its own. What begins as a corporate whistleblower story gradually reveals itself as a comedy of self-mythology, where the central mystery is not just the fraud at ADM but the bizarre, slippery mind of Mark Whitacre. The film’s voiceover is a major part of the joke and the unease: it keeps promising clarity while making everything more suspicious.
Worth noting
Steven Soderbergh plays the material with a light touch that only makes the absurdity sharper. Matt Damon is excellent as a man who wants to be seen as heroic, competent, and morally upright even as every choice he makes undercuts that image. The result is funny in a dry, almost clinical way, but it also lands as a sad portrait of a person who may not fully understand himself.
Bottom line
It won’t work for everyone, especially if you expect a standard investigative thriller. But if you’re open to a movie that treats corporate malfeasance like a fever dream of office politics, bad instincts, and increasingly ridiculous lies, it’s a very memorable watch.
Top Letterboxd reviews
Patrick Willems (4★) · 784 likes
The best voiceover narration in cinema history.
theshrillest (3.5★) · 567 likes
in pop culture, sociopathy is presented as a kind of superpower, always coupled with superior intelligence, animal cunning and razor-sharp instincts. The Informant! dares to ask: what if someone was a sociopath but also kind of a dim bulb?
Will Menaker (3.5★) · 402 likes
This is a true story of a guy who blew the whistle on Archer Daniels Midland and a massive corn syrup price fixing cartel, he was also a manic bipolar liar and corporate criminal. Doubly interesting because it's about an unhinged fabulist and is based on a book by Kurt Eichenwald, who is also an unstable lunatic and liar. He should have been a character in the movie.
Greta T. Narrator (5★) · 310 likes
God knows how many watches in, this became even more of a tragedy upon realizing that all the narration is little dissociative episodes whenever Mark doesn't want to think about what he's doing or saying. Forget that the movie's still funny after multiple watches, that the movie's still funny even with full awareness of how crushingly sad it is might be its biggest accomplishment.
matt lynch (3.5★) · 247 likes
"The birds eat the bugs, the cars eat the birds, the rust eats the cars, and the new construction eats the rust."
1998 · Crime, Drama, Thriller · 2h 1m · R · Curator 8.0/10 (147.9K ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, MGM Plus, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
A slow-burn descent into bad decisions and self-justification, with crime emerging from ordinary people under pressure.
2013 · Crime, Drama, Comedy · 3h · R · Curator 7.9/10 (5.7M ratings) · Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video, Paramount Plus Premium, Paramount Plus Essential, AMC+, Philo, Amazon Prime Video with Ads
For another energetic portrait of greed, delusion, and a lead character who turns self-destruction into performance.