USAToday
Claudia Puig
The Informers tries to shock with scenes of rampant drug-taking, orgiastic sex with underage partners and brutal scenes of random violence. But what is more shocking is the fact that three highly regarded actors - Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke and Billy Bob Thornton - chose to star in this dreadful film.
Did they read the script beforehand?
One of the characters, while high, says with desperation: "I need someone to tell me what is good and what is bad. How are you going to know those things unless someone tells you?" It's meant as tragic commentary on the clueless lives of these hedonistic characters. But Rourke, Thornton, Basinger and the rest of the cast also need some good/bad guidance.
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.
The story - based on a novel by Bret Easton Ellis, who also co-wrote the screenplay - meanders. It takes too long to determine who the characters are and how they're connected to each other. And once you figure it out, it's hard to care.
The pace is unbearably tedious, and most of the main roles are so thoroughly unlikable that no matter how sensationalized the action is on screen, it all just feels boring.
Mickey Rourke plays Peter, a seedy guy from Barstow who kidnaps a young boy to sell for "ransom" to a depraved club of pedophiles. He does his dirty deeds while traveling with a drugged-out young girl and his nephew Jack (played by Brad Renfro, who died of a heroin overdose in January of 2008).
Jack crosses paths with Graham (Jon Foster), the drug-dealing son of William (Thornton), a self-centered TV exec, and Laura (Kim Basinger), who is indulging in a joyless affair with Martin (Austin Nichols), one of her son's college-age friends. William is hellbent on avoiding the high cost of a divorce, but also continues to pursue his girlfriend (Winona Ryder), a TV news reporter.
The movie is set in the early 1980s, and most of the action takes place around Los Angeles, except for a brief sojourn to Hawaii, where the cruelly taunting Les (Chris Isaak) takes his son Tim (Lou Taylor Pucci) on vacation so they can meet young girls for some multi-generational dating.
It's all incredibly sordid and thuddingly uninteresting.
"You can't really make it in this world unless you're willing to do some awful things," says Renfro as the ultimately decent, but pathetic, Jack. That line must have also provided the rationale for director Gregor Jordan (Ned Kelly) to make this idiotic movie.
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