The Informant

Engrossing, suspenseful, honest drama: the best film on "the troubles" ever made.

Put this up against the other IRA movies of recent years, and they pale by comparison.

A visceral experience of the tortured Irish landscape; characters of great depth and complexity.

An even-handed look at both sides of the coin, Protestant and Catholic. What goes on there is, after all, a tragedy for everyone.

This is a movie all should see.

A compelling plot line and good acting from Timothy Dalton, somewhat hampered by his on-again-off-again Irish accent, with superb efforts from Carey Elwes, Maria Lennon and Anthony Brophy, make this film a must see for anyone with an interest in "The Troubles".

Although the plot tends to be somewhat heavy handed in its depiction of the English being the good guys, the storyline does a great job leading us through the torment of one man's decision to tout and the ripple effect this causes on everyone he's known. Maria Lennon plays the tortured wife exceptionally well and allows us to imagine the how painful living in Northern Ireland in the early 1980s must have been.

Were it not for the bias of the plot line being so one-sided I would have given this film a 9 out of 10.

I stumbled onto this on Showtime on a rainy night and expected little of it. To my surprise I was drawn into the plight of those trapped in the vicious stand-off of "The Troubles".

The movie conveys powerfully the oppressiveness of the weight of history that sustains the hatreds and the impossible dilemmas faced by people trying to navigate between the opposing forces.

The acting is generally excellent, particularly Maria Lennon as the wife torn between her husband and her loyalties. Anthony Brophy is superb as the trapped husband. The only weak link is Timothy Dalton who chews a bit too much of the scenery as the detective reeling in the unwilling informant.

The lengthy nude scene of Simone Bendix as Cary Elwes' lover is not "essential to the plot" but Simone is so stunning it would be churlish to complain.

Taut and effective. Give it a look.

This is arguably the best film there is about the troubles in Northern Ireland. Unlike films like Michael Collins, or In The Name of The Father, in this movie the IRA members are not shown as the romantic quasi-heroes they are thought to have been ages ago, they are shown as what they really are now: terrorists, capable of destroying the lives of not only their enemies, but also of many irish families who try to follow the normal course of their lives. The informant of the title is an ex-IRA assassin who makes a deal with the police, and gives the name of his employers. He and his family are then considered traitors of the "irish" cause, even though his wife, being more influenced by anti-brit propaganda, was against the so-called betrayal from the start. But she fails to escape the turmoil that follows: the poor girl is even raped by an IRA ganglord, as some kind of punishment for their betrayal, in a scene that certainly does away with the romanticism that can be expected from such a theme. This is certainly a view of the subject never shown in recent films about the Northern Ireland troubles. At the end of the day, unlike other similar films, there is no "moderate" faction of the IRA to solve things up, no Daniel Day-Lewis type guy to save the day, but only the feeling that things go on unsolved...

This film depicts the work of the IRA with no sentimentality or romanticism and for that I commend it.

The storyline is convincingly written. The acting is very good all round but I would give an outstanding mention to Maria Lennon whose work I had never seen before and Timothy Dalton from who this is just one more excellent performance. The one downside were a couple of the accents, including (and maybe most noticeably) Dalton's. Accents have never been his strong point! That said, he lends the role the same toughness yet humanity that he has to several other characters in his career, Bond included - all-round believability.

There is a twist that I found disappointing but I won't spoil it for those who have not seen it and may be thinking of doing so.