The Informant!

Steven Soderbergh’s wryly entertaining The Informant! tells the story of Mark Whitacre, an Archer Daniels Midland executive who turned informant for the FBI, helping to convict several top officials in a price-fixing conspiracy. One problem—he only tattled to cover up his own misdeeds, and embezzled from the company even while blowing the whistle. Matt Damon is excellent as Whitacre, whose bland personality masks the heart of a borderline sociopath, and who revels childlike in his “superspy” status while enwrapping two straight-arrow feds (Scott Bakula and Joel McHale, both good) in a web of lies. Soderbergh tells a juicy story well, but he fails to find the deeper levels that might have made it profound. He also commissions one of the oddest musical scores in years, vintage Marvin Hamlisch syrup that sounds like it escaped from a Neil Simon film.