The mere opening salvo of “The Informer” contains nearly enough plot to keep many a lesser shoot-’em-up exercise occupied for an hour or two: Just 10 minutes into Andrea Di Stefano’s undercover-mission-turned-prison-break-thriller, a family has been set on the run, an FBI bust on a Polish drug cartel has gone tensely awry, a character’s identity has been neatly pulled out from under us, and a cop has been shot dead.
Somehow, this impersonal but tightly wound Americanization of a Scandi-crime potboiler then continues escalating its short-of-breath narrative for almost two hours.
For all “The Informer” lacks in surface style — shot and scored as it is in functional, straight-to-vod fashion — it remains a surprisingly well-oiled genre machine.Opening Stateside in the January doldrums, several months after a modestly received late-summer bow in the U.K., this sophomore effort from Italian actor-turned-director Di Stefano is — like his Benicio del Toro
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