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Dir: Andrea Di Stefano. Starring: Joel Kinnaman, Rosamund Pike, Clive Owen, Common, and Ana de Armas. 15 cert, 113 mins
There are a hundred other films just like The Informer Clive Owen , Rosamund Pike , and Common ) and its promise of dirty dealings, there’s enough here to tempt a decent amount of filmgoers into buying a ticket. Not that they’d expect anything more than the bare bones of an action thriller and, in that respect, The Informer at least delivers.
The film’s hero is Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman), a loving, emotionally wounded family man who would do anything to protect his wife (Ana de Armas) and daughter. In fact, as the film goes to great pains to explain to us, he’s only a convicted felon because he stepped in to defend his gal from a lecherous bar patron. Now out on parole, he’s required to play snitch for an FBI agent (Rosamund Pike) determined to crack down on a Polish mob and one of its most notorious drug lords, The General (Eugene Lipinski). After a sting operation leaves an NYPD cop dead and the FBI in a panic, Koslow is asked to do the unthinkable: leave his family behind and go back to prison. To muddy the waters even further, Koslow’s also the target of police officer Grens (Common), who won’t stop until he discovers who put a bullet in one of his men.
Loosely based on the Swedish novel Three Seconds , and with its action transplanted from Stockholm to New York City, The Informer features an unnecessarily complicated web of conflicted loyalties and loose motivations. It’s almost as if the film’s screenwriters – director Andrea Di Stefano, Matt Cook, and Rowan Joffe – have become convinced the density of a film’s plot also dictates its depth. Sure, a lot of things happen, but there’s no meaning or weight to any of it. Character development is thrown immediately out of the window, as each player is simply dropped somewhere along the scale of moral purity (it’s Koslow’s wide-eyed and feverishly dedicated wife who, of course, remains the most innocent of them all).
The weakness of the film’s script never feels more evident than when it’s in the hands of Pike and Owen (as her unscrupulous boss), who share most of their screen time. They do their best to grunt and grimace their way through a series of tense confrontations, but you’re left only with the reminders of what they were capable of in other, better roles. Here, all they’ve got to rely on is “tough guy” talk. In fact, that’s all the film really consists of. The script’s been peppered with the word “f**k”, alongside a few racial epithets, so that the audience really knows that we’ve hit the mean streets of New York.
Show all 26 1 /2625 books that should have never been made into films 25 books that should have never been made into films
Warner Bros Pictures/Universal Pictures/New Line Cinema
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25 books that should have never been made into films The Da Vinci Code (2006) The Da Vinci Code is a stinker of the highest order. Its sequels, Angels & Demons (2009) and Inferno (2016), are also awful films, but the reason the initial Dan Brown adaptation ranks as the worst is because the others wouldn't have existed had this one not been so successful.
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25 books that should have never been made into films Eragon (2006) 20th Century Fox clearly wanted Eragon to be their answer to Harry Potter, but the terrible reviews stopped that plan dead in its tracks. Eragon is the worst kind of fantasy adaptation – one where all of the source materials' sense of fantastical vibrancy disappears during its translation to the big screen.
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25 books that should have never been made into films Running with Scissors (2006) Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors consistently walks a dangerous tightrope between manic farce and adolescent horror tale. Ryan Murphy’s adaptation, released in 2006, collapses beneath such a task. You can see why Murphy, for his feature film debut, would be attracted to a tale of neurotic family dysfunction and sexual awakening as they are themes that crop up in many of his TV shows (Glee, American Horror Story, etc). But this adaptation is a tonal misfire from start to finish, despite the best efforts of an all-star cast that includes Annette Bening, Gwyneth Paltrow, Evan Rachel Wood and Brian Cox. It’s no wonder this sunk without a trace.
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Entertainment Film Distributors
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25 books that should have never been made into films Kill Your Friends (2015) John Niven's Kill Your Friends is a blistering, debauched exploration into the life of a cocaine-sniffing record label agent. It passes by in the blink of an eye, which can't be said for its adaptation. The film, released in 2015, tries so hard to nail what Niven achieves so fluidly and it shows – the result is nothing short of embarrassing with the clean-cut Nicholas Hoult failing to convince as the sociopathic Steven Stelfox.
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25 books that should have never been made into films On Chesil Beach (2017) Despite magnetic performances from Saoirse Ronan and Billy Howle, this adaptation of Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach was weighed down by a turgid script and clumsy old-age make-up. The finished product is worlds away from the McEwan adaptation that Ronan previously starred in – the Oscar-winning drama Atonement (2007).
Lionsgate
Characters love to speak in code, even when there’s no reason for them to be so secretive. That’s just what characters in action thrillers are meant to do, after all. Di Stefano even plays it fast and loose with The Informer ’s violence. It’s never consistently brutal to really make an impact, but there’s enough of it there to keep things on the right side of gritty. The film simply doesn’t trust its audience to understand what’s going on at any given moment. Take, for example, when Koslow is enlisted to help dispose of the cop’s body. He has blood on his hands now, metaphorically speaking, but the film also has to show it in a literal sense to make sure the point’s been made. In the end, it’s nothing more than a box-ticking exercise created to convince everyone that this is a serious, adult thriller. And, sure, The Informer might fulfil those most basic of requirements, but anyone looking for substance will be left sorely disappointed.
The Informer is released in UK cinemas on 30 August
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