Steven Soderbergh‘s The Informant! — an entertaining enough LQTM dramedy with a jaunty Marvin Hamlisch score and a knockout lead performance by Matt Damon — is, in my mind, a Midwestern gene-splicing of Joe E. Brown‘s Alibi Ike (1935) and Sidney Lumet‘s Prince of the City (1982). Soderbergh’s film is basically about pathological lying, and Ike was a Chicago Cubs baseball movie about a guy who couldn’t help telling one whopper after another. Mix that in with the Prince of the City ethos (i.e., nothing can be hidden) and there it is.
