Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating * * *
Cast: Ana de Armas, Rosamund Pike, Joel Kinnaman, Clive Owen, Common, Ruth Bradley, Arturo Castro, Sam Spruell, Nasir Jama, Martin McCann, Jenna Willis, Eugene Lipinski, Edwin De La Renta, Karma Meyer, Alex Ziwak, Scott Anderson, Charles Mnene, Miroslaw Haniszewski, Victor Yarbrough, Alphonso Austin, Peter Coe, Lena Kaminsky, Daniel Duru.
Doing the right thing can quite often get you into more trouble than those who sit back and play hard and fast with regulations and common decency; no matter what the situation and how you may have saved a certain event from blowing out of all control, potentially saving lives in the process, there will always be those that will look down upon you and plot their revenge on your name and character.
Whilst nobody likes a grass, a whistle-blower or an informer quite often has good intentions at the very base of their reasoned betrayal to the cause they despise, or they have even been placed in that position and left with little choice in the matter, they either disclose or they lose something or someone dear to them.
The difficulty arises when cinema tries to delve into this world without offering the pain that comes with such an action, it might be implied, it could be affected, but it is never truly captured in a way that gets to the centre of the moral maze we all have to traverse when we want the world to be fair, to be true to the ideal we hold.
The Informer is a film that at least attempts to get under the skin of what it feels like to be playing off against those that see you as theirs, and the damage that is delivered by the authorities when they find they cannot control the intelligence gathered, not so much a game of cat and mouse, but of reveal and treachery on all sides.
Unlike the Noir genre which revels in such consistency, such films as The Informer are lost across many different tropes and ideas, never really standing in a firm place, tangled up in an espionage, urban warfare, criminality gaze that it is almost a treachery in itself to place the framing of the story in one tidy and mechanical box. The audience is left feeling bitter at the sentence handed down, but they also want to feel the restoration of justice, an equalisation of the two sides at war for the information sought. What The Informer gets right is the belief that Pete Kaslow’s life is ruined whatever the outcome, a brave step against the feeling of closure.
It is this, and the acting of Joel Kinnaman and Rosamund Pike that gives the film the lift it needs, the savagery of the betrayal by the two sides is keenly delivered and well observed, but strangely has to contend with the rest of the experience which drowns the action and style in a vat of regurgitated sentiment and unadoring dialogue.
A film that had potential to explore beyond the usual sense of duplicity but instead remained loyal to the traditional and routine.
Ian D. Hall