Steven Soderbergh's latest, "The Informant!," comes off like the smartest, funniest kid in the class — a wiz at everything he does from physics to basketball, but somehow friendless.
His sin lies in being too clever for his own good and too self-satisfied to hide it. Kids like him would be better suited to living in a monarchical dictatorship, with him running the show top-down. If you don't get his jokes, hurled with precise aim from the depths of a brain geared permanently at warp speed, then go live in a democracy where there's a safety net for the slow and unsharp. Or so the film seems to say.
The title and opening credits are rife with smarmy wit; what's with the exclamation mark anyway, the 1960s color scheme and squiggly font copped from the "Yellow Submarine" album jacket?