The Informers (2008)

In my opinion this movie is a decent piece for cinematography history!For 2008, $18,000,000 is a different amount money rather nowadays. How I understand most of them were paid for actors with big name and in my opinion they done a good job.1. A good actors play. You need just look at the list, watch the trailer and a 10-15 minutes of the movie.2. This movie touches different relationships and situations in our world. For example, situation between father and son, how rich kids live and communicate with each other, situations with divorce and marriage, love and hate, kidnapping situation with a doorman, etc......3. Movie basically about life in "One week in L.A. in 1983.....". Where we can see real life situations, kind of separate novels but have some connections. Verdict: For sure it is not something incredible, with some clichés and have some questionable nuances, but it's worth to watch some evening after hangover, crazy party or sleepless night. Maybe can answer for some questions or give you a food to think.

Past film adaptations of Bret Easton Ellis novels have been well received. So, with Ellis on board as screenwriter, you could see where stars like Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and Winona Ryder would have been attracted to The Informers. Unfortunately for all involved, including Ellis who would pretty much disown the movie after its release, the script was handed to director Gregor Jordan. And Jordan made a complete mess of it. He wanted to take things in a darker direction. Well, he succeeded in making it dark. He didn't succeed in anything else. He ended up making a truly awful movie.The film unfolds in early 1980s Los Angeles. It's a sex, drugs and rock and roll story. For brevity's sake, let's just say that everyone is sleeping with everyone else. That's pretty much accurate. It's an ensemble piece with a whole bunch of characters, none of whom you actually end up caring about. All these characters have their own stories which are in some cases loosely intertwined, in some cases not intertwined at all and thus ultimately pointless. Thornton and Basinger just mail in their performances, they're totally lifeless. Rourke's character is a waste of time, he's only in one of those completely pointless subplots. Ryder really has only a bit part. These older stars may draw the attention but the film's story focuses more on the younger generation. Nobody in this younger crowd stands out as being particularly interesting, none of the performances rise above the mundane. They have some sex, then we cut back to one of the other story lines, then we come back to them again and they have more sex. If nothing else at least Amber Heard, playing a young woman who gets passed around like a used handkerchief, looks spectacular. So there's that.The only character who comes across as truly sympathetic is a young doorman, Jack, played by Brad Renfro. If any performer comes away from this film with any credit at all it's Renfro, playing a guy struggling to deal with the shady doings of his uncle, the Rourke character. Unfortunately Renfro's performance largely goes for naught as this story really doesn't tie into the main plot at all. Honestly though saying this film has a main plot is probably giving it too much credit. There is no real story tying this thing together. Too much time is wasted on characters who serve no purpose. There's a drugged-out rock singer who likes to sleep with young girls. There's a guy on the world's most awkward vacation in Hawaii with his dad. What do these characters have to do with anything? Nothing. Nothing at all. The film is just a jumbled, largely incoherent, mess. And then it just ends. No resolution. All these stories, no endings. On the one hand you're grateful it's over because you certainly don't want to watch this film any longer. On the other hand you're left feeling insulted that you wasted any time at all watching this pointless film which was ultimately going nowhere.

This meaningless film wallows in the sewer for its entire running time, then ends on an equally pointless and sour note. It's a bunch of dead end story threads about shallow, scum characters that don't engage the viewer on a single level. It's slips way past boring and into tedium watching these fools misbehave and talk gobbledygook about their drab, pathetic empty lives. The producers threw writer Nicholas Jarecki off the picture who was set to direct and replaced him with Gregor Jordan, who changed the script to suit his misdirected vision. Being fired from this production gave Jarecki's career a shot in the arm, when it freed him up to begin his directing effort Arbitrage, which is miles better than this garbage. Gregor Jordan on the other hand has moved on to straight to video and television productions, which is ample punishment for creating this soulless hack work.

It's kind of strange to explain why I liked this film. Maybe it was the ensemble casting united; or maybe it's because I tend to enjoy hyper-linked stories where unconnected situations and characters will connect with each other at the ending; I really don't know. Or more important, perhaps I didn't find reasons enough to dislike it even though there were plenty of them.Bret Easton Ellis adapts his own novel into the screen and even though I haven't read the book I believe this is somewhat well adapted, very close to his style of writing and characters presentations and inconclusive endings to some of them. The story presented has several characters (played by Billy Bob Thornton, Kim Basinger, Jon Foster, Lou Taylor Pucci, Winona Ryder, Brad Renfro, Mickey Rourke, Chris Isaak, Rhys Ifans among others) messing up with their lives while trying to figure out a meaning to it. It all takes place in the 1980's (as usual with Ellis works) and it does involve sex, drugs and rock n'roll. The problem with "The Informers" is that it is a movie that doesn't have a heart or it just doesn't beat enough, by that I mean that you leave the experience without getting much except the reunion of a good cast giving average performances. We're thrown with these characters, know few things about them, then the story tries to conclude something but not enough to let us take our own conclusions of why they do what they do. For instance, the story involving the kid and his father on vacation trying to get to know each other where the father tries to communicate with his son who knows that this is impossible, since they have nothing in common. It only gives innuendos about the boy's sexuality, some sort of confusion and in the end we kept wondering what was that all about. There's something there that could be explored more, the script never answered what needed to be answered so the bond with its audience is a little inexistent.The weakest aspect of all is that it doesn't look the 80's, it's too much 2000's, it's too updated. To have an good example of recreating an decade years later and also a film based on Ellis novel, "American Psycho" was infinitely better not only the story but also bringing the 1980's back with their colors, the loud music (and of great quality), the pop culture references. In "The Informers" it's only a music here and there or a TV report about the AIDS that inform us that we are in another decade. This melancholic tale about ill fated characters living as a lost generation has its good moments. It's a good film, it never leaves you uninterested or bored or angry. It's main difficulty is a script that doesn't dig a little deeper and rarely gives some powerful insights about how troubled was the 1980's even with everything going in your favor like the characters presented here, all rich and beautiful but miserably sad. 6/10