The Informant: trailer preview

Steven Soderbergh is at it again, this time with a screwball corporate caper starring Matt Damon called 'The Informant'. View the trailer here...

Is Steven Soderbergh Hollywood’s busiest man? UK audiences will be able to catch his low-key digital experiment ‘The Girlfriend Experience’ (starring porn actress Sasha Grey) on November 20 this year, and from two weeks before that, they’ll also be able to see ‘The Informant’, a black comic corporate caper that stars Matt Damon in a role which looks like one to file next to his exceptional performance as Tom Ripley.

Based on the non-fiction book of the same name by Kurt Eichenwald - an investigative reporter for the New York Times - the film sees Damon as the goggle-eyed Mark Whitacre, a dependable middle-manager for the high-rolling chemical corporation Archer Daniels Midland who in the mid-'90s blew the whistle on the company’s supposed financial misdeeds to the FBI.

The film looks markedly similar in theme to Michael Mann’s ‘The Insider’, but from the evidence here, Soderbergh has obviously laced the material with his own amusingly ironic sheen, suggesting that there are hidden depths to the story and the central character.Soderbergh, as we know, is not one to shy away from lampooning the world of business, and the bland management speak, sharkskin suites and vulgar neckties reminded us a little of his brilliant loonball satire ‘Schizopolis’ (1996). And what could be more topical in the week that Bernard Madoff was jailed for 150 years for mammoth corporate swindling?



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