Andrea Di Stefano’s The Informer is a crime film in the key of both Henry Hathaway and Barbet Schroeder’s versions of Kiss of Death, in which a protagonist is caught between powerful external forces, attempting to wiggle his way out of an ongoing war. As in those two films, The Informer is more interested in said forces—tendrils of law enforcement and organized crime—than it is with the plight of its hero, who functions as something like a football being pushed up and down a field, marking the progress of cops and criminals.
Both Kiss of Death films are essentially chamber narratives that reduce law enforcement and the mob down to a few players each. By contrast, The Informer is surprisingly ambitious, with the F.B.I., the N.Y.P.D., the Polish mob, and various other outlaws thrown into the mix. This ambition leads to several surprising twists, but the film is overstuffed with so much plot that the characters are rarely allowed to simply inhabit their atmospheres.
The Informer introduces several of its core players with a tense and exciting drug deal gone awry. Pete Koslow (Joel Kinnaman), a snitch embedded in the Polish mob, leads the F.B.I. to a pickup of a fentanyl shipment from the Polish embassy. For reasons that don’t make a lot of sense, Pete is held accountable for the killing of an undercover cop, Daniel Gomez (Arturo Castro), by the head of the mob, Klimek (Eugene Lipinski), who insists that Pete intentionally violate his parole so he can go back to prison and establish an empire of fentanyl addicts behind bars. Klimek memorably orders Pete to build him an army, and the F.B.I. agent in charge of the investigation, Wilcox (Rosamund Pike), forces Pete to comply, as Daniel’s murder botched the F.B.I.’s ability to connect the drugs to Klimek.
With Pete behind bars, we’re primed for a story of how he’ll play everyone against each other in order to survive and return to his wife, Sofia (Ana de Armas), and daughter, Anna (Karma Meyer). But Di Stefano and co-writers Rowan Joffe and Matt Cook keep throwing characters and complications at Pete. Grens (Common) is a cop looking to avenge Daniel’s death, and he gums up the F.B.I’s increasingly sketchy mission, earning the wrath of F.B.I. division head Montgomery (Clive Owen), who orders Wilcox to cut Pete loose, which ironically complicates Grens’s own plans. For a while, it’s enjoyable to see how various forces cancel out their own ambitions while screwing Pete over, though we rarely get to see Pete in action. The most compelling thread, Pete’s establishment of an entire branch of a drug cartel against his will, is lost in the shuffle, and more and more new characters keep showing up to announce their intentions. The Informer often feels like a miniseries compressed into a three-act feature.
Still, the film remains somewhat diverting even as it grows convoluted. Outside of the Easy Money series, Kinnaman has rarely been allowed to utilize his tightly wound intensity this explicitly; more than ever he suggests Peter Greene and Peter Weller rolled into one, and he’s given two brutally close fight scenes here that memorably utilize his long, chiseled physique. Common and Owen do little more than glower, but they chew their lines with a charismatic bitterness that’s reminiscent of character actors from the vintage American crime films that have clearly inspired Di Stefano and his collaborators. Which makes it especially a shame that The Informer didn’t also take a cue from the compactness of many such films.
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