The Informant!

The Informant! centres on Mark Whitacre, an executive at the agri-industry corporation Archer Daniels Midland, who alerts the FBI to a price-fixing arrangement his employer has been running with international competitors. Eager to see himself as a hero of ordinary consumers and expecting a reward for his courage, he agrees to cooperate with the investigation, wearing a wire and carrying a hidden recorder while imagining himself as a secret agent on a dangerous assignment. The agents soon find that the hardest part of the case is working out how much of what Whitacre tells them is true, since his own accounts keep shifting.

Steven Soderbergh directed the film, the seventeenth of the thirty-five features he has made, following Che: Part Two and preceding The Girlfriend Experience. Scott Z. Burns wrote the screenplay, and Matt Damon plays Whitacre, with Scott Bakula as FBI agent Brian Shepard, Joel McHale, Melanie Lynskey, Tom Papa and Rick Overton among the cast. The production, made for about 22 million dollars, returned roughly 42 million worldwide.

Audiences have been more reserved than critics: on TMDB the film holds a 6.2 rating from just over a thousand votes, while the critics' rating stands at 6.8 from 231 reviews.