The Informant! is a comedy directed by Steven Soderbergh and starring Matt Damon as Mark Whitacre, an executive for a food company who comes forward to the FBI about his company price fixing a food additive in virtually everything called lysene.  These are the same people who pretty much put high fructose corn syrup in everything.  It’s based on a book of the same name (also available through Audible: ) that is actually a true story written by Kurt Eichenwald.

 

I really did not know what to expect from this.  I went in knowing pretty much nothing.  The advertising was horrible.  I mean look at that poster above.  It gives you no clue of what this movie is about.  The commercials were similarly vague and only hinted that it was funny.  The idea that I formed for myself would be that it’d be like a sort of funny version of The Insider.  It really wasn’t though.  The narrative is mostly driven by a voice over delivered by Damon’s character.  This voice over is probably the best part of the movie.  It is extremely funny.  They mostly have nothing to do with what is going on and just give you an inside line into the character of Whitacre’s brain on some level.  Here’s an example:

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