Rating: 5/10

Bret Easton Ellis' most recent book-to-screen adaptation, THE INFORMERS, suffers from the same case as Chuck Palahniuk's recently adapted CHOKE; they are sizable letdowns compared to their predecessors (FIGHT CLUB for Palahniuk and LESS THAN ZERO, RULES OF ATTRACTION and AMERICAN PSYCHO for Ellis). It is not that THE INFORMERS is a terrible movie, it just bears the same skin-deep superficiality as its main characters.

THE INFORMERS is melodramatic like a daytime soap opera, replacing an actual story with what they want to be earth-shaking one-liners that will be in the Memorable Quotes section of IMDb (this will likely never happen).  It feels like Bret Easton Ellis adapted a fair screenplay, Gregor Jordan shot the movie which ended up being too long, and the studio made them cut it in half.

The movie follows 5 different Los Angelians and their 1980's amoral lives, as if they were trying to make a xerox copy of MAGNOLIA, with many different stories coming together again.  But instead of finishing with impact and brilliance, the end of THE INFORMERS leaves you feeling like you haven't seen anything.  The nudity, sex, drugs and rock n' roll (literally) might be the only redeeming value for this movie for some people.  If your life in the 1980's was actually like this, you might like to rehash the excess, barring, of course, that you are not in a mental institution, stricken with HIV or have died of an overdose.

The only redeeming value in this movie comes from the surprising performances within: Chris Isaak does a fantastic job of playing a rich deadbeat father reliving his youth in Hawaii with his bi-curious son, played by THUMBSUCKER's Lou Taylor Pucci, and Mickey Rourke's cameo is what you would expect from the actor: gruff and uncanny.  Where THE INFORMERS lacks in frivolous storyline it unfortunately does not make up for anywhere else.  In the end, the shallowness of the movie only confuses the audience and restricts them from picking up anything of value from the story.