First off, here's a few things going on in The Informant! -- corporate greed, deception, fraud, embezzlement, wiretapping, a spy who calls himself 0014 (because he's twice as smart as 007), and mental illness.

Mark Whitacre, played by Matt Damon, is an honest-to-goodness natural liar and cheat -- under good direction of Steven Soderbergh, who holds your interest in a complicated financial scheme.

This adds up to tons of chuckles rather than belly laughs.

You won't believe this film is almost true.

We've all seen movies about whistle-blowers like The Insider and Erin Brockovitch.

Well, meet Mark Whitacre, a biochemist who is fed up with things that are going wrong that he doesn't approve of.

Told through narration and stream - of - conscienceness, the more we learn, the more we are kept in the dark in this strange tale of price-fixing, corporate greed, embezzlement, and wire-tapping.

Who are the bumblers and who are the villains?

Well, that depends on who you believe.

I like true stories because most are hard to believe, and this one really takes the cake.

The film stars Matt Damon, who does an excellent job playing the flawed, mentally unstable executive of a large agri-business who develops super-spy delusions while becoming the whistle-blowing informant for the FBI.

This is one weird dude, and it helps to think of him as an off-beat character study who in the end got caught with his hand in the till.

This movie is a corporate crime comedy that is almost non-fiction.