Matt Damon Earns The Informant! its Exclamation Point

In this installment of the Two-Minute Verdict, we contemplate Steven Soderbergh and Warner Bros.'s attempt to sell you a story of corporate malfeasance, investigative intrigue, corn-centric scandal, and prodigious 21st-century greed. Oh -- and a doughy, bumbling Matt Damon. The results are mixed.

Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, the Archer Daniels Midland exec who blew the whistle on the company's price-fixing scheme in the early '90s. As Soderbergh notes both in loving close-ups and emphatic title cards, "Corn!" is at the center of the whole plot, and Whitacre's distaste for ADM's treachery leads him to strap on a wire for an FBI investigation. G-men Scott Bakula and Joel McHale (!) patiently aid their informant, whose outrage at his corporations methods is exceeded only by his delusions of grandeur; someday, Whitacre believes, when this whole scandal is over, he will be lauded as ADM's savior and rightly installed as president.

The real Whitacre spent three years as the feds' inside man, a paranoiac stretch that exacerbated his battle with bipolar disorder. Funny, right? Soderbergh and Damon sure hope so, laying one gag atop another here in the pursuit of something like the anti-Michael Clayton, refracting Tom Wilkinson's own batshit turncoat through the looking glass of recession-era America (both then and now). If you thought Inspector Clouseau was a little on-the-nose, you'll probably want to shield your face from Damon, who famously gained 30 pounds to join the farce-genre heavyweight division. Maybe the mental illness angle comes later, along with a sequel detailing Whitacre's hilarious eight-and-a-half-year prison stint for fraud and tax evasion?

Come to think of it, why did Che Guevara get two movies and Whitacre -- both a massive corporate criminal and the Justice Department's closest ally in the biggest corruption case of its time -- only gets one? Answers, Mr. Soderbergh, answers.

VERDICT: Curious at best.