Film Review – Confidential Informant

Long ago, Michael Oblowitz was a music video director who received an opportunity to make films, impressing some with 1997’s “This World, Then the Fireworks.” He’s been a journeyman ever since, even dipping his toe into DTV action cinema with a pair of Steven Seagal titles (“The Foreigner” and “Out for a Kill”). Oblowitz hopes to get back to raw behavior with “Confidential Informant,” with the helmer co-scripting (with Michael Kaycheck and Brooke Nassir) a leathery cop drama about the lengths people go to protect others, especially those who break the law to do some good. Perhaps the picture was initially imagined as a return to police movies of the 1970s, but the final cut doesn’t retain much in the way of intensity or personality, and the feature makes a strange creative decision when it jettisons its most promising plot development at a critical point in the endeavor. “Confidential Informant” is clumsy work, with Oblowitz striving to make a point about brotherhood and honor (the bruised kind), but the whole thing is muddled and cliched. Read the rest at Blu-ray.com