Amber Heard, Austin Nichols, Billy Bob Thornton

Focusing on the Los Angeles of the early 1980s, "The Informers" balances a vast array of characters that represent both the top of the heap (a Hollywood dream merchant, a dissolute rock star, an aging...( read more  read more... ) newscaster) and the bottom (a voyeuristic doorman, an amoral ex-con). Connecting all these intertwining strands are the quintessential Brett Easton Ellis protagonists--a group of beautiful, blonde young men and women who sleep all day and party all night, doing drugs--and one another--with abandon, never realizing that they are dancing on the edge of a volcano.

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24% liked it

2,046 ratings

Critics

14% liked it

99 critics

R, 1 hr. 38 min.

Directed by: Gregor Jordan

Release Date: April 24, 2009

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DVD Release Date: August 25, 2009

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Flixster Reviews (692)


  • November 5, 2009
    You know what is even worse then "The Hills" is a film that for some strange reason believes that when it becomes as shallow, vain and self-righteous its deep and insightful art. This is the type of film experience "The Informers" is
  • September 18, 2009
    The potential was all there, but it just didn't make it. One thing I would say it lacks is quality on behalf of how the film moved and the general dynamic of the characters. For someone as glitzy as Bret Easton Ellis, the characters shone no real vibrancy that I knew of. I was i...( read more)rritated and bored by the end. We get it, you're vapid, have an epiphany already.
  • September 12, 2009
    Piece of crap, don't rent this, it sucks
  • September 8, 2009
    Very odd movie. I didn't really like it much. Really good cast, but it just seemed thrown together.
  • August 26, 2009
    "Greed is good. Sex is easy. Youth is forever."

    A multi-strand narrative set in early 1980's Los Angeles, centered on an array of characters who represent both the top of the heap (a Hollywood dream merchant, a dissolute rock star, an aging newscaster) and the bottom (a v...( read more)oyeuristic doorman, an amoral ex-con). Connecting the intertwining strands are a group of beautiful, blonde young men and women who sleep all day and party all night, doing drugs -- and one another --with abandon, never realizing that they are dancing on the edge of a volcano.

    REVIEW

    The problem I had with this movie is the script. It was something almost anyone could have written and I found myself not sympathizing with anyone or anything in it. The acting was, of course, quite good but not excellent, considering the actors were capable of so much more. In the end, its just a depressing film about a worn out subject: morality. I guess I wanted something more, something actually clever. I was surprised by some of the rave reviews its been getting. I suppose because people still believe that if you make a film depressing enough, put enough high quality actors, it's going to be good. The truth being that its very easy to make a powerful impression by showing a glimpse of the lives of dysfunctional people. Its much more film-worthy to craft a drama where one can truly sympathize and relish in the skills of the actors, such as with films as "The Shawshank Redemption" or "The Green Mile." However, this film just left me with a feeling that this was made to satisfy the egos of the actors involved or in an attempt to win an award. This is a pass.
  • November 2, 2009
    Wow was this movie bad. I could spend the rest of my day telling you how bad it was, but that would be spending more time than the movie itself deserves. I'm going to pretend this one doesn't even exist.
  • October 29, 2009
    Way too many stories and it was hard to figure out who was doing what with who and when!!
  • October 28, 2009
    I didnt realize till I went to review this "movie" on Flixster that it had actaully had some sort of a short lived theatrical release. . . There is a very good reason for this. If an option were available to me to give this thing 0 stars I would have done it! Terrible! Terrible! ...( read more)Terrible! There are some big names in this film too! One being Mickey Rourke who isnt even listed. We know what he was thinking in this time before he became big again but as for the others. . . NO CLUE.
  • October 28, 2009
    There is so much potential to The Informers, but it never manages to actually be that great. I really liked how the story was made up of various plotlines and characters that intertwined together. In the beginining parts the acting/script was awful, but i didn't notice it as much...( read more) as the film went on. So, it either improved or I just grew used to it. Idk. I've never read the book, but i really liked Bret Easton Ellis' American Physco, and this is really pretty similar. The eighties style takes a little getting used to. Overall, it really was enjoyible enough, but it just wasn't good enough to be great.
  • October 27, 2009
    "I need someone to tell me what is good, ok, and I need someone to tell me what's bad. Because if nobody tells you these things, Martin, then how do you know what's good and what's bad? And then what happens?"

    A character in The Informers makes that impassioned plea roughly an h...( read more)our and fifteen minutes into the film, and I feel he has a point, so it is my duty to tell you what is good and what is bad.

    The Informers is bad. Just... really, really bad.

    The early 80s were a hell of a time (apparently), it was a time of bad hair, loud fashion, consequence free sex, nose candy and rampant self-absorbtion. The Informers is set in the early 80s, a point it goes to great lengths to make with references to Devo, Safety Dance and on-the-nose fashion statements (when characters actually bother to wear clothes, that is), a point it couldn't have made more clear had it lit up a giant neon sign that said "THIS IS THE 1980's" and then proceded to have John Rambo (from Rambo III, obviously) blow it up with an rpg, all to the strains of Flock of Seagulls (they're actually on the soundtrack, by the way).

    The Informers is an ensemble picture following several unrelated but (vaguely) interconnected characters, none of which are in any way likeable or interesting (a character need not be likeable if they are interesting, so The Informers fails twofold). The characters interconnected nature is almost pointless as there is no convergence, or pay off, at the end of the film, they may as well have been utterly seperate characters in utterly seperate stories. The stories would still be banal and uninvolving and the characters would still be loathsome, vapid fuckwits, but at least there would be no presumption that this horseshit is actually heading somewhere.

    Mel Raido, lips locked in a perpetual pucker, affecting an accent like Ralph Brown from Withnail & I (or Wayne's World 2, if you're that way inclined. I actually half expected him to start talking about brown M&Ms), staggers through the entire film like he just crawled out of a car crash with a serious head injury. Quite what his story is about (beyond a slow crawling, pitifully dull examination of the emotional numbness that comes with a life of excess divorced of restriction) will continue to elude me and I will not revisit the film to figure it out.

    Amber Heard prances around naked, gets fucked, or talks about fucking, and then dies of superAIDS. That's pretty much her contribution to the film. She contracts and dies of AIDS in a matter of days, somehow. There's no drawn out illness, she feels under the weather, and suddenly drops dead. Quite how this special strain of AIDS didn't wipe out most of the North American West coast in the 1980s is beyond me, it puts the Outbreak monkeys flu to shame.

    Chris Isaak plays drunk, but I suspect he actually was drunk while filming this because only real drunks can be this boring and without charm.

    Mickey Rourke earned enough good will from The Wrestler (which he shot after this, but still) that I won't hold this clunky performance against him, he's not bad but for a man of his talents it just screams of "coasting", while Billy Bob Thornton sleepwalks through yet another role. He gave more passion and conviction in Eagle Eye than he displayed here. Eagle bloody Eye. For fucksake, Billy Bob. Kim Basinger mostly just yells, increased volume and smeared mascara are a substitute for worthwhile acting but at least there's a semblance of life in her. It's fake and unconvincing but I admire the "effort" in a film almost devoid of it.

    Brad Renfro shows the most life in his performance, erratic and twitchy though it may be (possibly more a drug issue than an acting choice), which is ironic given that for all outward appearances he does look like a bloated, rundown corpse before the heroin actually made him a bloated, rundown corpse. I would love to say Renfro got a fine send-off in The Informers, something enduring like Peter Finch or Heath Ledger, one deserving of the promise he showed in The Client, Apt Pupil or Bully but it's simply not the case. In fact, I'd say Renfro should count himself lucky he croaked when he did, because it means he got to miss out on the tidal wave of derision that would have swept his way when this film was finally released.

    These bland, unlikeable characters meander through their boring, lifeless stories which mercifully just end. They barely reach a second act before they end abruptly. Renfro and Rourke are involved in the kidnapping of a small child, whom Rourke plans to sell to a group of vampires. In the book they're vampires, in the movie they're just nameless bad people who want a kid for some reason and we're supposed to be fearful when Renfro and Rourke are forced to flee these "bad people". They flee and Renfro lets the boy go. That's the end of that story. All that flaccid build up for nothing. The most closure we get from a story is when Amber Heard dies of fast acting AIDS. Dropping dead from SuperAIDS is the most elegant and thoughtful conclusion this film could manage.

    The film is a relatively scant 98 minutes and yet it feels longer. Imagine the painful wait you endure when you're 10 minutes early for a dental appointment, sat in the waiting room and struggling to keep your composure. Time slows down and every second is a fresh hell of discomfort and tedium waiting to be unleashed. Now imagine being 98 minutes early for a dental appointment. That's the entire runtime for The Informers.

    The direction is so lifeless and lacking in tone that no actor's performance escapes unharmed. Such a vacuum of energy it is, it even manages to make the near constant nudity of Amber Heard look utterly unsexy. Her particularly pleasing form is not enough to sit through this film, simply wait for Mr. Skin or somebody to compile all her nude scenes together into an mpeg. It obviously seems crass to dedicate an entire parageaph to talking almost exclusively about a naked girl but this really is the only positive thing I can think to say about the film.

    My mind was telling me that this was satire, it's Bret Easton Ellis afterall, but at no point does the film show the slightest spark of energy, slyness or spite that informed both American Psycho and Rules of Attraction. It feels like somebody took Ellis' work and surgically removed the humour, leaving us with a very earnest and po-faced look at a group of people nobody likes and nobody should like, and feigning for profundity instead of maliciously sending up that false sense of importance that the rich and priveledged may or may not feel.

    Basically it takes Ellis' bread and butter and replaces it with a ciabatta and pesto. Satirical vitriol replaced with unearned pretension, and without that mean, knowing edge we're left with a film about deeply boring and ugly people doing deeply boring and ugly things. There's nothing here worth spending your time on. Fuck this movie.

Critic Reviews


July 17, 2009
Nigel Andrews, The Financial Times

Bret Easton Ellis pens a mean tale, in all adjectival senses. His prose is artfully maleficent; he is a laid-back Severus Snape of the sex-and-drugs generation. You need a smarter directing hand, thou... full review

April 24, 2009
Pete Hammond, Hollywood.com

There seems to be no point to this derivative Bret Easton Ellis retro-wallow. It's all sex, drugs, rock 'n roll and boredom - with the emphasis on boredom. full review

April 24, 2009
A.O. Scott, The New York Times

The performances run the gamut from twitchy to catatonic, and the stoned stiffness of the actors seems to have less to do with the affectlessness of the characters than with their own confusion. full review

April 24, 2009
Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Has an air of detachment and sadness, enhanced by the movie's being set a full quarter century ago. Like new cars in an old movie, these people may glow with youth, but we watch them in full awareness... full review

April 24, 2009
Kurt Loder, MTV

The movie has more dead scenes than a Monday night in Magnitogorsk. full review

April 23, 2009
Peter Travers, Rolling Stone

Do some blow. Curse humanity. Convert to nilhilism. Reread American Psycho. But don't for the love of God and cinema see The Informers. full review

April 23, 2009
Colin Covert, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

TMZ with phony gravitas. Ellis' stories had more oomph before drug-crazed screwups like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan and Amy Winehouse became the center of the Internet news cycle. full review

April 23, 2009
Moira MacDonald, Seattle Times

Ellis' book, though a grim read, had a satirical edge to it that made it darkly enjoyable; the movie is simply dark and dull. And vampireless, more's the pity. full review

April 23, 2009
Ty Burr, Boston Globe

The piece had better have something fresh to say. The Informers doesn't, nor does it seem to want to. full review

April 23, 2009
Claudia Puig, USA Today

The dialogue is laughable. Lines are spoken so languidly that the actors seem bored. Shattering revelations are delivered in the same monotone as casual patter. full review

View more The Informers reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

Comments


  • jonnydaddy
    February 25, 2009
    Cant wait to see this!!!!!!! Huge Ellis fan!!

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  • Which Bret Easton Ellis novel has not been made into a film by the same name?  Answer »
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