Informant (2012) ****
Dir. Jamie Meltzer
Review By Greg Klymkiw
Brandon Darby lives in a state of constant fear. His actions have made him a target. The death threats mount daily and he'll never know when IT is coming. He's made this choice for the good of his conscience, his country and mankind.
Brandon Darby is a hero.
When Hurricane "Katrina" decimated New Orleans and every level of American government abandoned the disenfranchised in a blatant bid to cull the less fortunate from the herd that is the United States, this passionate, anarchy-embracing activist single-handedly demonstrated the true, raw courage of what it really means to be American. He travelled to New Orleans at great personal peril in search of a missing friend, found him, then stayed to selflessly provide leadership, lifesaving and support to those people abandoned by their own government.
Darby even travelled to Venezuela in hopes of raising money for those in New Orleans who needed it most - an act that would have shamed America if it wasn't for the shady South American oil barons who mysteriously attempted to have him lead an armed insurrection with left-wing Colombian guerillas on American soil - sending him fleeing a dangerous, precarious and somewhat nefarious intervention by New World Order thugs.
No, really. As if the aforementioned wasn't enough, Brandon Darby is most definitely a hero.
An All-American Hero!!!
During the 2008 Republican Convention, he was personally responsible for the arrest of two domestic terrorists who intended to toss potentially deadly and destructive Molotov Cocktails during a planned melee - threatening the lives and property of innocent people who merely wished to peacefully exercise their democratic rights.
Brandon Darby is also a scumbag. This self-obsessed, self appointed, self-promoting miscreant used the tragedy of Katrina to extol his Messianic view of himself to the world and when the going got tough in South America, he scurried back with his tail twixt his legs.
No doubt about it.
Brandon Darby is an A-One, top-level sleaze-o-rama scumbag. This turncoat to activism, this self-aggrandizing fake; worked as an FBI informant to needlessly and cruelly entrap two young men as poster boys of criminal intolerance, leading to their vilification and imprisonment.
Now Brandon Darby is the key spokesman and advocate for the righter-then-right-wing Tea Party.
Take what you will of the aforementioned, but when you take all of it you have the stuff of great drama - a narrative full of complex twists and turns, enough conflict to layer the most complex political thriller and a central figure, Brandon Darby, a tragic hero of Shakespearean proportions.
Only thing is - filmmaker Jame Meltzer's Informant is no fiction, no straight-up drama.
It's one of the most fascinating and compelling documentary features of this past year. It will chill, anger and rivet you in ways that all good cinema should, but by the end, Meltzer provides two sides to the coin and everything in between which will force you to assess what you've seen and draw your own conclusions.
Who exactly IS Brandon Darby? Well, even after seeing this film and ruminating upon it long and hard, you might feel you know even less about Brandon Darby than you think you do.
And this is precisely why Informant will have you nailed to your chair with your eyes glued to the screen.
This is a movie - one hell of a movie at that!
"Informant" is in theatrical release via Kinosmith.