Steven Soderbergh’s Most Underrated Film Proves That Anything Can Become A Heist Movie

If you’ve never seen The Informant!, which just got a new 4K Blu-Ray, the easiest point of comparison in director Steven Soderbergh’s filmography is Erin Brockovich, another real-life story of corporate corruption tackled by an unlikely individual. But if you take a step back, The Informant!, which stars Matt Damon as the man who assisted a ‘90s FBI investigation into price-fixing in the animal feed industry, is part of Soderbergh’s surprisingly varied body of heist films.

“Pulling something off” is arguably the lens Soderbergh uses to explore the world, and the ambitious double con that Damon’s Mark Whitacre actually tried to pull off reveals how the heist movie depends on a balance between close-up magic and undeterminable chance. Unfortunately for Whitacre, the real world is far more chaotic than Hollywood makes it look.

How Was The Informant! Initially Received Upon Release?

Steven Soderbergh films have run the gamut from dazzling blockbusters to sober Oscar-winners and minimalist genre exercises, so it can be difficult to gauge the success of The Informant!. The sly, smarmy whistleblower drama received positive attention: the full four stars from Roger Ebert, a sharp write-up in Film Comment, and a Golden Globe nomination for Damon’s performance as Mark Whittacre.

But the number of dissenting voices – who complained about Soderbergh’s distracting choice to tell the serious ups and downs of its exclamation marked protagonist with a smug comic tone – explain why the film was only moderately successful (although a talky corporate drama earning nearly twice its budget would be celebrated as a win for cinema these days). Thanks to the attractive lure of Matt Damon’s awestruck dumb guy smile on the poster, The Informant!’s opening weekend matched the sum that Whitacre stole from his employer while working with the FBI.

Why is The Informant! important to See Now?

The logic of the heist movie need not be restrained to casino jobs, bank robberies, and diamond thefts. These are just the environmental details put on top of a dramatic structure that relies on clarity and expectation being challenged by chance and human frailty. Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven remains the gold standard of heist capers, and the sequels Twelve and Thirteen subvert and reinforce the genre rules. These are films about people achieving something with machine-like efficiency being tested over and over by the random, unpredictable universe. They may be trying to steal millions, but our heroes are more interested in briefly flirting with divine impossibility.

With this metric in mind, the number of Soderbergh heist films grows exponentially. It’s not just visible in his crime films Logan Lucky, Out of Sight, and No Sudden Move, but also in stories about rigid industries. High Flying Bird is about an NBA agent toying with hungry businessmen to end a punishing lockout for rookie players. Erin Brockovich is about the incremental hustles and battles necessary to take down a corporate giant. The Informant! best honors the fragility of the conman or thief (Whitacre was both) trying to pull off the impossible; it’s a film about an obsessive liar trying to pull off two different jobs at once, and never dropping the con even when the game is unmistakably up.

On the insistence of his wife (Melanie Lynsky), Whitacre tips off Special Agent Brian Shepard (Scott Bakula) that the food processing giant Archer Daniels Midland is fixing lysine prices, an animal feed additive, with an international cartel of competitors. Whitacre is eager to help Shepard and Special Agent Bob Herndon (Joel McHale) wiretap the clandestine price-fixing meetings, even if his eagerness is undermined by a comic lack of professionalism.

Mark narrates every step around the office while wearing a wire, awkwardly saying the full names of people he encounters for the benefit of his federal eavesdroppers. Whitacre opens his briefcase during one of the covertly filmed cartel meetings, where any of his colleagues would simply have to look to see the microphone and tape recorder inside. The closest Whitacre comes to bungling the whole operation is when he enters a hotel room and beelines for the concealed camera, staring into the lens with pointed, baffling focus.

The underpinning tension of The Informant! is the question of why such a senior executive would betray his company like this. Whitacre seems too bumbling and skittish to have the sturdy moral compass necessary to turn informant out of the goodness of his heart. Odd comic details hint at hidden layers to his personality that obstruct clear comparisons to Danny Ocean or Erin Brockovich: his voiceover narration features dubious anecdotes and random trivia snippets that indicate either a scattered interior world or a tendency to misdirect his audience, and the FBI has to stress multiple times that he will not, in fact, inherit his company after his cooperation in bringing down the top brass becomes public.

Our confused grasp on our central conman’s intentions is given some clarity when we learn that Whitacre is also embezzling millions from ADM by accepting corporate kickbacks amid his FBI work. The closing act of The Informant! is where Soderbergh’s arch comic tone, most at home in the hustler genre, provokes meaningful frustration and sadness: we’re watching a short-sighted, unwell (and most importantly, real) criminal collapse under his own misguided and improbable ambitions. Anything can become a heist movie, but not everyone should lead one.

What New Features and Upgrades Does The Informant! Blu-Ray Have?

Warner Bros. has been riding the 4K upgrade train with great enthusiasm in recent years, and it makes sense for a film shot in 4K digital to become available to buyers. Beyond that, this release features deleted scenes and commentary from Soderbergh, who has a terrific track record of giving incisive and playful commentaries to the point of arguing with his bitter screenwriter.

The Informant! is available on 4K/Blu-Ray now.