The Informer review: Joel Kinnaman stars in a sharp, cunning crime thriller

Dir: Andrea Di Stefano. Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Rosamund Pike, Common, Clive Owen, Ana de Armas, Sam Spruell, Martin McCann. 15 cert, 113 min.

The Informer is one of the year’s more pleasant genre surprises: a clenched fist of a crime thriller in the mode of The Departed or The Town, in which every element is just a notch smarter than you’d expect. Generic though the film may look, it holds together absorbingly, thanks to a sturdy script which ups stakes and adds characters with cunning and intelligence. If it’s modest and somewhat middling in scale – at least in a world where Dwayne Johnson exists – the classical containment of the storyline often works in its favour.

The source is a novel called Three Seconds, by the post-Stieg-Larsson Swedish thriller-writing team of Roslund/Hellstr?m. While their plot has been transplanted to New York, Italian actor-turned-director Andrea Di Stefano (Escobar: Paradise Lost) is at the reins, and the casting has an international flavour: it could practically be set anywhere, just as The Departed relocated its web of double- and triple-crossing from the Hong Kong of Infernal Affairs to the mean streets of Boston.

Ex-convict Pete (Joel Kinnaman, from the Robocop remake) begins it in a bind, and the noose just keeps getting tighter. After killing someone by mistake in a bar brawl, he has negotiated for early parole to resume his life with a wife (Blade Runner 2049’s Ana de Armas) and young daughter. But the conditions involve going undercover for the FBI to spring busts on drug cartels – an assignment which he’s sent in to do with woefully inadequate intel or protection.

An intended raid on the Polish mob backfires horrendously when a buyer turns up at the worst possible moment, and turns out to be an undercover cop, played in a brilliantly anxious, across-the-table set piece by Narcos’ Arturo Castro. Pete’s penance in the aftermath is to go along with what the Polish boss wants, which is to install him back in prison distributing their product. And whether he likes it or not, the Feds think this is their best chance to salvage arrests from the mess they’ve made.

Rosamund Pike’s slightly glazed, walled-off quality cuts her out nicely to play Pete’s FBI handler, Wilcox, who’s caught in the middle with professed responsibility for him, and backtracking orders from her superior (Clive Owen), a cold fish tempted to wipe his hands clean of the whole arrangement. Their position gets worse with the arrival of Common – as an NYPD colleague of Castro’s character – who strides into the movie with grim authority at the half-hour point, like a rook unleashed to do significant damage in the middle game.

The film’s other secret weapon is Kinnaman, an actor whose sour solemnity isn’t strictly likeable, but who gives off the air here of simply not having time to fuss around with our sympathies. He shoulders the prison scenes with a colossal knot in his heavily tattooed back, and his character’s stress is the motor that keeps the whole film running.

The climax with a kidnapped guard (Sam Spruell) is a tad far-fetched, and there’s some grisly stuff with Polish goons coming for Pete’s family which could have been tighter, but the film’s constructed shrewdly enough to ride out the odd wobble. While gritty genre fare gravitates more and more to the small screen, it’s strangely satisfying to watch two hours spent doing business the old way.

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