The Informant
Starring: Gilles Lellouche, Tahar Rahim, Riccardo Scamarcio
Director: Julien Leclercq
Rating: 2.5/5
Julien Leclercq returns to the director's chair this week for his third feature film The Informant: a movie that is based on the novel by Marc Fievet.
In order to free his family from financial worries, Marc Duval (Gilles Lellouche), a Frenchman expatriated to Gibraltar, becomes a spy for French customs.
From petty trafficking to shady cargo, he progressively wins the trust of Claudio Lanfredi (Riccardo Scamarcio), a powerful cocaine importer tied to the dangerous Columbian cartels.
This in-depth immersion in the world of drug trafficking forces Marc to take increasing risks.
But, as he rises in the cartel hierarchy, he also discovers easy money, temptation and a luxury lifestyle. Permanently living on a knife-edge, only his lies keep him alive.
Abdel Raouf Dafri has adapted the novel into a screenplay - and since he was the man behind the screenplay for The Prophet, I was expecting big things.
Sadly, this movie never really gets going and director Julien Leclercq never quite manages to create the tension and anticipation that he is clearly looking for.
He does manage it in bits, but he cannot sustain that throughout the whole film: which is a major shame.
And because of the lack of atmosphere and tension throughout the film, the ending is a big of a let-down. It is not the huge crescendo that we are so used to seeing with movies in this genre.
Don't get me wrong, this will not be the worst movie that you see this year, but I was just hoping to get so much more - it really was a story that had a huge amount of promise.
Gilles Lellouche and Tahar Rahim both give very solid central performances as Marc Duval and Redjani Belimane, but the weakened script really does let them down.
The Informant plunges audiences into a world of criminals and drug trafficking, but there are other movies in the same vein that a much better.
The Informant is out now.