--- title: "The Informant!" year: 2009 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/the-informant" fi1m_id: "the-informant" imdb_id: "tt1130080" tmdb_id: 11323 wikidata_id: "Q604083" fi1m_score: 71 critics_score: 69 critics_reviews: 12 published: "2026-09-09" updated: "2026-09-18T08:37:54.558577+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # The Informant! (2009) Directed by Steven Soderbergh · 1h 48m · MPA R · Drama, Comedy, Crime ## Identity The Informant! - **Canonical:** https://film.one/film/the-informant - **Type:** Film - **Fi1m ID:** the-informant - **IMDb ID:** tt1130080 - **TMDB ID:** 11323 - **Wikidata ID:** Q604083 - **Same entity:** https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1130080/, https://www.themoviedb.org/movie/11323, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q604083 **Fi1m score: 71** · Critics 69 from 12 reviews *In a sentence:* Matt Damon brings down a corporation while thinking about ties, polar bears and how he looks wearing a wire > Steven Soderbergh tells a true story of corporate price-fixing as a 1960s caper and hands Matt Damon a whistleblower who cannot keep his mind on the job. Damon is superb. The film around him is clever, brisk and slighter than it thinks. ## Synopsis Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is a biochemist turned executive at ADM, an agricultural corporation in Decatur, Illinois. When a problem at the plant brings the FBI to his door, he tells agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) something much bigger: his employers are meeting their foreign competitors in hotel rooms to fix the price of lysine, an additive for animal feed. Encouraged by his wife Ginger (Melanie Lynskey), he agrees to wear a wire and record the meetings, while Shepard and his partner Robert Herndon (Joel McHale) try to keep their eager new informant on script. Steven Soderbergh directs from Scott Z. Burns’s screenplay, with a running voiceover in which Whitacre’s mind wanders wherever it likes. ## Review Mark Whitacre is a biochemist and a rising executive at ADM, an agricultural giant in Decatur, Illinois, and in the early 1990s he tells an FBI agent that his employers have been meeting their competitors in hotel rooms to fix the price of lysine, an additive for animal feed. He agrees to wear a wire. Steven Soderbergh, working from a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, tells this as a comedy, and has put an exclamation mark on the title in case we were in any doubt. It is a smart, brisk, frequently funny 108 minutes, and it rests almost entirely on Matt Damon. He carries it. What is built around him is thinner than it looks. Damon plays Whitacre padded, moustached and bespectacled, with a toupee he is touchy about and a smile that arrives a second too early. Burns’s best idea is the voiceover. While the agents brief him on how to hold a briefcase so the camera inside it points the right way, Whitacre is thinking about ties, about the Japanese word for working yourself to death, about whether polar bears know their noses are black. Damon delivers all of it in the same bright, helpful tone, a man who wants to be liked by everyone around him, including the people he is recording. It is a performance with no vanity in it at all, and it is the reason to see the film. Soderbergh shoots it himself, and he has drained every image to mustard, orange and brown, so that a film set in the 1990s looks as if it had been left in a drawer since 1974. Doug J. Meerdink gives the executives wood-panelled offices and hotel conference rooms with jugs of iced water, and Shoshana Rubin puts the men in short-sleeved shirts and ties that are too wide. Stephen Mirrione cuts fast and starts the voiceover in the middle of scenes, so we often hear Whitacre’s mind wander while his mouth is still saying something incriminating. Marvin Hamlisch’s score, all xylophone, brass and bossa nova, announces at every turn that this is a caper. For an hour it is right. After that it is the sound of a film nudging us in the ribs. The supporting cast is largely comedians playing it straight, and the trick works. Scott Bakula’s Brian Shepard is a decent, patient FBI man who believes his informant because it has not occurred to him not to. Joel McHale, as his partner Robert Herndon, spends most of the film wearing the face of someone doing sums in his head. Melanie Lynskey plays Ginger Whitacre, who pushes her husband to go to the bureau in the first place, and gives her a warmth the script does not always earn. Tom Papa, Rick Overton, Tony Hale and Allan Havey turn up as executives, lawyers and supervisors, and each gets one moment of open-mouthed disbelief. We laughed a great deal in the first hour, mostly at the distance between what Whitacre is doing and what he is thinking about while he does it. Then, somewhere past the hour, Shepard begins to learn things about his informant that we will not describe, and we stopped laughing. The film did not. Bakula’s face in a late interview, tired and quiet and no longer amused, is the truest thing in the picture, and Hamlisch keeps the xylophone going underneath it. We came out unsure whether Soderbergh found Whitacre funny, or sad, or simply useful. The price-fixing itself barely registers. We are told what the scheme was, but never shown anyone it hurt, and ADM stays a set of offices rather than a force. Soderbergh’s [*Erin Brockovich*](https://film.one/film/erin-brockovich) (2000) made a contamination case clear enough to be angry about; this one treats the crime as a backdrop for the liar standing in front of it. Damon justifies that choice for long stretches, but it leaves the second half with only one thing to do, which is reveal more of Whitacre, and each reveal lands a little softer than the last. See it for Damon, who has rarely been this loose or this careless of his own dignity, and for the pleasure of watching serious men in beige rooms slowly realise what they have signed up for. It is fine at home, where the colours look less deliberate and the score can be lived with. It carries a 15 certificate and runs 108 minutes, which is about right. The exclamation mark is doing a lot of work, and by the end it is doing most of it. *Fi1m score 71, published 9 September 2026.* ## Straight answers **How long is The Informant!, and what is it rated?** *The Informant!* runs 1h 48m and is rated R by the MPA in the US. It is a drama and comedy film. **Where can I watch The Informant! in the US?** *The Informant!* is streaming on The Roku Channel and Amazon Prime Video in the US, and it is also available to rent from Amazon Prime Video from $2.99. It leaves The Roku Channel on 1 October. Availability is checked daily; the links above go straight to each service. **What should I watch after The Informant!?** After *The Informant!*, try [*Burn After Reading*](https://film.one/film/burn-after-reading) (2008, Fi1m 72): The Coens’ idiots-in-espionage comedy, with the same fondness for men who think they are clever. Then [*Catch Me If You Can*](https://film.one/film/catch-me-if-you-can) (2002, Fi1m 83): Spielberg’s con-man caper, warmer and faster, with a pursuer who grows to like his quarry; and [*The Insider*](https://film.one/film/the-insider) (1999, Fi1m 89): The whistleblower story told deadly straight, so you can see what Soderbergh chose not to do. ### Reviews we read (19) - **The AV Club**, Tasha Robinson (A-): The critic finds the lively dark comedy thoroughly entertaining, praising the voiceover that reveals the protagonist's bizarre mental babble alongside the true story's mix of wry laughs and shock. [Read](https://www.avclub.com/the-informant-1798206975) - **RogerEbert.com**, Roger Ebert (80/100, inferred): The critic finds the film a fascinating human comedy that peels back layers of deception in the true story of a corporate whistleblower. Matt Damon's performance is highlighted as deceptively effective in portraying an unreliable narrator. [Read](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-informant-2009) - **Time Out**, David Jenkins (4/5): Soderbergh’s flippant corporate caper is a self-satisfied madcap bauble whose subtextual delights are unlocked by its exclamation mark and Damon’s supremely nuanced performance plumbing narcissism and psychosis. The director and writer focus on a credible psychological portrait rather than the corporate dealings themselves. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/the-informant-1) - **The New Yorker**, David Denby (75/100, inferred): The critic sees the movie as a return to form for Soderbergh, with Damon delivering a voluble, endearing performance as the unreliable informant. It effectively subverts expectations through its layered deceptions and emotional charge. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/09/21/young-romantics) - **The Times**, Wendy Ide (75/100, inferred): The film filters whistleblowing intrigue through duplicitous recklessness and plays out in conference rooms with a giddy 1960s caper pace; it is more fun than any film about industrial bio-chemistry has any right to be. [Read](https://www.thetimes.com/article/the-informant-3qrd6s5s2pg) - **Empire**, Kim Newman (70/100, inferred): Soderbergh takes a lighter, wry approach to the whistleblower story, building the film around Matt Damon's brilliant, disguised performance as the deluded informant. It is amusing rather than hilarious and feels less substantial than similar films but succeeds in establishing Damon as a character actor. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/informant-review/) - **Film Comment**, Nicolas Rapold (70/100, inferred): Soderbergh's film presents a perplexing, bumbling whistleblower whose fabulism strains the true story of corporate corruption. The critic highlights Damon's strained boyishness and the film's increasingly difficult-to-read tone, along with the obtrusive score and strong supporting cast. [Read](https://www.filmcomment.com/article/review-the-informant-steven-soderbergh/) - **Los Angeles Times**, Kenneth Turan (40/100, inferred): The film is viewed as a quirky, self-amusing exercise by Soderbergh that fails to engage broader audiences, with the voice-over stream of consciousness proving uninteresting. Damon's effort is noted but the overall concept lacks appeal. [Read](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2009-sep-18-et-informant18-story.html) - **The Guardian**, Peter Bradshaw (40/100, inferred): The critic finds the film a strained comedy that overplays its wackiness with an exclamation mark and jazzy score; the strange true story would have worked better told straighter, as in an Alexander Payne film. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2009/nov/19/the-informant-review) - **Screen Daily**: Soderbergh turns the true story into an uneven semi-comedy that can’t quite decide its tone, with the best moments intensely dramatic despite a razzle-dazzle score. An energetic Matt Damon performance helps, but the film is too clever by half for mainstream audiences and unlikely to last awards season. [Read](https://www.screendaily.com/the-informant/5005326.article) - **Sight and Sound**, Michael Atkinson: The film is an affectless, self-annihilating comedy-character study that reflects its hero's narcissistic worldview more than delivering laughs or drama. Matt Damon's nuanced, high-wire central performance as the delusional Whitacre is singled out as perfectly convincing and unforgettable. [Read](http://old.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/review/5229) - **Slant Magazine**: The critic finds Soderbergh's larky comedic mode sterile and Damon’s central performance damaging, concluding that the audience ends up duped by the fabulist’s ruses. [Read](https://www.slantmagazine.com/film/the-informant/) - **The Hollywood Reporter**: The critic views the film as a comedy about a compulsive liar and whistleblower but finds the tone desperate and at war with itself, questioning exactly which lies are meant to be funny. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-reviews/informant-film-review-93467/) - **The Independent**: The film is a facetious and half-baked comedy about corporate crime that fails to land either as full comedy or thriller. Soderbergh's offhand treatment prevents the story from having emotional impact despite some provocative points about price manipulation. [Read](https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/reviews/the-informant-venice-film-festival-1783366.html) - **The New York Times**, Manohla Dargis (Critic’s Pick): The film is praised as a masterwork of narrative compression that treats corporate malfeasance as a collective tragedy best met with laughter. Soderbergh's direction and the zany score are singled out for making the oddball true story compelling. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/movies/18informant.html) - **Collider**, Matt Goldberg (A-): The critic finds the film delightful and witty, carried with the lightness of Soderbergh's Ocean's movies despite its heavy theme about the usefulness and abuse of lies. They single out Matt Damon's likable, versatile performance as the standout element that makes the story work. [Read](https://collider.com/the-informant-review/) - **Den of Geek**, Luke Savage (3/5): Soderbergh turns the corporate scandal story into an offbeat comedy showcase for Damon's deluded, larger-than-life Whitacre, complete with wandering voiceover and an eclectic cast. The film is fantastically well made and entertaining but lacks dramatic tension and a character to root for. [Read](https://www.denofgeek.com/movies/the-informant-review/) - **Digital Spy**, Stella Papamichael (60/100, inferred): Damon gives an endearing, funny performance as the insecure, lying whistleblower in this glib true-life comedy thriller, with the voiceover revealing his attention deficit and hero fantasies. The film milks laughs from his delusions but remains curious rather than insightful about his compulsive behaviour and leaves viewers less informed. [Read](https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a187313/the-informant-187313/) - **Eye for Film**, Jeff Robson: Soderbergh crafts an engaging, intelligent and very funny comedy-thriller that plays with conspiracy thriller conventions. Damon delivers a superb, nuanced performance as the self-righteous, unreliable whistleblower whose eccentricities and lies complicate the FBI investigation. [Read](https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/the-informant-film-review-by-jeff-robson) ## Details - **Director:** Steven Soderbergh - **Director:** Steven Soderbergh - **Screenplay:** Scott Z. Burns - **Cinematography:** Steven Soderbergh - **Editor:** Stephen Mirrione - **Music:** Marvin Hamlisch - **Production design:** Doug J. Meerdink - **Costume design:** Shoshana Rubin - **Producer:** Gregory Jacobs, Howard Braunstein, Kurt Eichenwald - **Cast:** Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre; Scott Bakula as Brian Shepard; Joel McHale as Robert Herndon; Melanie Lynskey as Ginger Whitacre; Tom Papa as Mick Andreas; Rick Overton as Terry Wilson; Thomas F. Wilson as Mark Cheviron; Clancy Brown as Aubrey Daniel - **Runtime:** 1h 48m - **Certificate (MPA):** R - **Release (the US):** 18 September 2009 - **Genres:** Drama, Comedy, Crime - **Budget:** $22 million - **Box office:** $42 million ## Where to watch in the US - The Roku Channel: add-on, hd, leaving 2026-10-01 - Amazon Prime Video: add-on, uhd - Amazon Prime Video: rent $2.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $9.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-10.* Also available in: AR, AT, BE, BG, BR, CA, CL, CO, CZ, DE, EC, EE, ES, FR, GB, IE, IT, MX, MY, NL, PA, PE, PL, RO, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## If you liked this - *Shattered Glass* (2003): Another likeable liar played straight, and the moment his editor stops believing him. - *Time Out* (2001): Laurent Cantet’s quiet French study of a man who invents a job rather than admit he lost one. - *Burn After Reading* (2008), Fi1m 72: The Coens’ idiots-in-espionage comedy, with the same fondness for men who think they are clever. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/burn-after-reading.md) - *Catch Me If You Can* (2002), Fi1m 83: Spielberg’s con-man caper, warmer and faster, with a pursuer who grows to like his quarry. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/catch-me-if-you-can.md) - *The Insider* (1999), Fi1m 89: The whistleblower story told deadly straight, so you can see what Soderbergh chose not to do. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-insider.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/the-informant