Damon gives exclamation-point worthy performance, but the movie fails to ignite or excite

Isn’t it nice when filmmakers are so excited about the final product that they add an exclamation point to the title? The Informant! It’s about a whistleblower! It stars Matt Damon! It’s going to be great!

If only that sense of excitement carried through the film’s entirety, but most scenes in The Informant! are punctuated by a couple good lines – maybe calling for some italics to indicate a key word or two – but then they just slowly… trail… off….

What that exclamation point accurately represents is that this is not your usual man against The Man movie — this isn’t David vs. Goliath or even Erin vs. Pacific Gas & Electric. The Informant! is the comedic version of the underdog story because the hero is so very unheroic.

Director Steven Soderbergh, who helmed Erin Brockovich and helped Julia Roberts land an Oscar (more about that later), is able to change the tenor here because the root of all evil is corporate greed and corn. Contaminated water killing kids isn’t funny. Corn, on the other hand, is uproarious. And Soderbergh gives you an earful of jokes about one of America’s oldest crops that turn an otherwise dull tale – a story of corporate giant Archer Daniels Midland fixing the price of corn oil – into something moderately entertaining.