The Informant!

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

(R)

**

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A corporate whistle-blower isn’t quite what he seems.

Steven Soderbergh’s “skewed, stylistic” film tells the true story of an agribusiness executive who helped uncover a price-fixing scandal, then got convicted for accepting kickbacks himself, said Nick Chordas in the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch. “Clearly material for a comedy, right?” Yet somehow the director has made a film that’s often excruciatingly funny. “The biggest reason why The Informant! works as well as it does” is Matt Damon’s performance as nebbishy, delusional whistle-blower Mark Whitacre. His hyperactive voice-over narration is the best—and worst—part of the movie, said Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal. It’s hilarious to listen to the ramblings of Whitacre’s “addled mind” as he suddenly veers into deep descriptions of his hygiene habits or “whether his car’s marquee is pronounced ‘Porsh-uh’ or ‘Porsh.’” But we never understand why he’s doing what he’s doing. The Informant! tries to present the blithely amoral Whitacre as “the whacked-out soul of corporate America,” said David Edelstein in New York. But the film breezes over serious issues of “corporate misbehavior and its ramifications” and so descends into “a limp burlesque” of more traditional whistle-blower tales.