Starring Joel Kinnaman, Anna de Armas, Rosamund Pike, Clive Owen, Common, Eugene Lipinski
Directed by Andrea De Stefano
Rating: *** ½ (3 and a half stars)
It’s been a while since I saw a thriller with balls and chutzpah. Outwardly a genre-celebrating formula action-thriller, The Informer hurls way across its specific requirements into an arena of sheer entertainment.
The screenplay is far more accomplished than it would outwardly seem. Tense and tactile, complex yet seemingly simple the narrative spins a web of deceit and counter-deceit where the lines are blurred to an extent that right and wrong seem like Siamese twins.
Right away, we are introduced to the protagonist Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman) who works for a drug cartel and is about to squeal on his accomplices to a rogue subsidiary of the FBI led by two agents, played with lavish immorality by the brilliant Rosemund Pike and even more brilliant Clive Owen. These law enforcers especially Owen, are portrayed as even more ruthless than the social outcasts whom the law wants more than anything in the world.
Given that everyone from the drug cartel to the FBI is out to get their own pound of flesh, whom does Pete turn to in order to protect his wife Sofia (Anna de Armas) and Anna?
Fear grips the heart in a sweaty clamp in this tense thriller. The action is more spontaneous and unrehearsed than the genre usually allows. Not one road chase with skidding wheels in a film about the exchange of gunfire on roads that be plundered. The screenplay chooses not to take the easy way out and refuses to satiate us with cheap thrills.
From the start, I could feel the dread and terror of Pete who wants to go straight. But he is given no moral leeway to back off from his long life of multiple crimes.
As played by the extraordinarily ordinary Joel Kinnaman, Pete Koslow puts on-screen his character’s back-story and front, intensely energizing the growing pall of doom in which the plot so ravishingly revels.
We feel the anxious rage and growing frustration of the protagonist as he seizes to be his naturally lawless self only as long as his family is safe.
It’s a remarkable premise for an action film. The director and his writers etch an exemplary platform for the hijinks to not come undone in a way that most films of the action genre do. The heat is relentless and the chill that spreads around the narrative’s heart is actually a warning about what a cornered hero can do when pushed against the wall.
Almost the entire screenplay shows the protagonist running away from his past. You may be dazzled by the bloodshed. But at the end of the day, you wouldn’t want to be in Pete Koslow’s running shoes.
