Matt Damon plays Marc Whitacre, the quirky President of Archer Daniels Midland, in the  latest Steven Soderbergh film The Informant!.  Whitacre has aspirations to climb the corporate ladder all the way to top yet thinks blowing the whistle on the company’s global price fixing scheme will catapult this mission. Boy was he in for treat.   Based on true events, The Informant! is a movie that I consider just ‘ok.’ I was expecting a bit more from this movie.

Well now that you know the movie is based on true events, you can ruin the entire plot by wikipedia’ing Whitacre’s life story. I recommend not doing that because it will take away from a lot of the spontaneous humor found in this movie. However, Whitacre is such a bizarre guy, that the movie drags on a bit too long.  From watching the trailer, I was expecting a lot more laugh-out-loud humor.  Most of that humor is in the trailer itself, leaving the film devoid of the comedic element that would have made the movie a lot better.

However, Damon does play Whitacre extremely well.  I typically measure performances based on whether an actor makes you forget who is acting and how well he/she becomes the character. Thus, when looking at the screen you only see the character.   Damon succeeds here.  I did not know anything about the story nor did I know anything about Whitacre, but I from watching Damon, I can imagine how ridiculous a person Whitacre really was. Also, Damon put on at least 20lbs of fat for this film. We even get to see the beer belly. That’s dedication.

I’ve heard people discussing potential Oscar nominations for this film. I’m here to say this film is not deserving.  If anything, Damon could be considered for his performance, but that’s it.  While Soderbergh is a genius, it did not take an Oscar worthy performance to complete this film.  Sure, it was well directed as Soderbergh was able to tell the story without explicitly telling you what was going on, but that does not mean it should be nominated.

Bones divx What did you think?

• Atlantic City video

Sumuru trailer

Last Holiday trailer