50
It’s a busy film, so it holds your attention that way. But it’s busy checking off all of the crooks and crooked cops cliches it can, leaving the project little time to experiment with much that’s new. Or worthwhile.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz
The entire movie doesn’t merely tip-toe into the ridiculous, it dives head-first into the shallow end of stupid, cracking its head, and yours, along the way.
70
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
The movie has a surfeit of the sudden reversals and interlocking loyalties that can make for an absorbing time killer.
63
Outside of the Easy Money series, Kinnaman has rarely been allowed to utilize his tightly wound intensity this explicitly.
70
For all The Informer lacks in surface style — shot and scored as it is in functional, straight-to-VOD fashion — it remains a surprisingly well-oiled genre machine.
60
The Hollywood Reporter by John DeFore
While the script bounces from the cops to the feds to the cons and back, it fails to take us to that Donnie Brasco sweet spot in which the psychological pressures of being In Too Deep threaten to crack our hero, whether somebody gets a shiv into him or not.
50
Los Angeles Times by Michael Ordona
The Informer isn’t bad. It’s just nothing special. It relies too much on familiar elements. It’s the same throbbing score, the same expected betrayals and the same smiling, sadistic bad guys.
60
The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw
The Informer is spread over a big canvas, but by the time of its big finale it is leaking energy. It might have made better sense as an episodic drama on television but it is brash and watchable, its world reeking with cynicism and fear.
60
The Informer is a film that favours brawn over brains, punching its way through any plot predicaments. A smart hairpin or two would have made it a juicier watch.
80
The Informer is one of the year’s more pleasant genre surprises: a clenched fist of a crime thriller in the mode of The Departed or The Town, in which every element is just a notch smarter than you’d expect. Generic though the film may look, it holds together absorbingly, thanks to a sturdy script which ups stakes and adds characters with cunning and intelligence.