The Informers (2008)

The Informers (2008)

Written by Bret Easton Ellis and Nicholas Jarecki, adapted from Ellis’ novel of the same name

Directed by Gregor Jordan

            Wow! This one was a doozy.  This movie, I have concluded, was a disaster.  Somehow, I loved it and hated it at the same time (and I didn’t hate it in a good way).  Read on!

            What I did like: The slick direction.  The music.  The ample nudity. Amber Heard. The Mickey Rourke storyline.  That’s about it.

            What I didn’t like: Everything else.

            I couldn’t really understand the story, but I’ll try to sum it up.  This was one of those flicks that follows 3 or 4 or 13 different stories at once.  The movie opened with the death of some guy via car accident.  I think this was how they were trying to connect everybody together, but it didn’t really work.  This guy had a best friend, Graham.  Graham has no personality, but he has a super fucking hot girlfriend, Christie (Amber Heard), who sleeps with everybody.  No, literally, everybody. And then everybody else.  She even sleeps with Graham’s best friend (that’s the dude with the stupid hair in the second picture), who is sleeping with Kim Basinger, who is the mother of Graham.  Kim Basinger is divorced from, but getting back together with her movie executive ex-husband, Billy Bob Thornton, who is sleeping with a news anchor, Winona Ryder.  One of Billy Bob’s clients is the popular musicion Bryan Metro.  Bryan Metro likes to sleep with children.  Well, not little children.  Just teenagers.  In a completely unrelated sub-plot, there’s also another kid (played by Lou Taylor Pucci, who was in one of my favorite movies – The Go Getter) who is visited by his estranged, certifiably insane father, played by Chris Isaak.  Yes, that Chris Isaak.  In yet another unrelated sub-plot (and coincidentally, the only one I enjoyed), there’s Mickey Rourke’s character, who is the uncle of Brad Renfro (in an amazing final performance before his death by drug-overdose).  Mickey Rourke kidnaps a little kid and wants to sell it for $6,000.  I shit you not, everytime this part came back up, my stomach hurt from the stress of watching it.  As you can tell, the story was terrible and convoluted.  Each one of these sub-plots could have been extrapolated into a movie of its own, and none of them had any quantifiable conclusion.  You’re never with any of the characters long enough to care about them, and most of them are such dispicable pieces of shit that you hate them, so when the story does something to them, (like kill them with AIDS), it’s really hard to conjure up any emotion.  Even then, most of the dialogue is so melodramatic and self-indulgent that it borders on laughable. 

If you’ve seen or read American Psycho, then you know how 80’s satire should be done.  That’s a movie/book that knows what it is.  It’s a toungue-in-cheek look at the excesses of the 80’s.  It’s super-violent, and super-filthy, but it’s ok there.  Here, there’s just to much.  From what I’ve read, this movie was torn apart in the re-write process.  Apparently, one director left before shooting began, and when Gregor Jordan signed on, he rewrote the script, taking out most of the satire, a vampire subplot, and all of the humor, prompting most of the cast to either jump ship or just give terrible performances.  I have read American Psycho, and loved it, but I haven’t read anything else by Ellis, so I can’t say how this is compared to the novel, but I am going to make it a point to read this once I finish In the Woods (by Tana French, it’s very good so far, btw).  Honestly, I’m can’t really recommend this movie though.  If you do see it, see it for Brad Renfro’s performance and Amber Heard’s nudity.