‘Informer’ a well-oiled genre machine

has been shot dead. Somehow, this tightly wound Americanisation 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, it remains a surprisingly well-oiled genre machine.

This sophomore effort from

Italian actor-turned-director Di

Stefano is, like his Benicio del Torostarring debut Escobar: Paradise Lost, a B-movie of the honest old school, dignified by the canny casting of consummate professionals who get the job done while plainly marking time. In particular, as the requisite timber-jawed man-against-thesystem protagonist, Swedish star Joel Kinnaman brings a stern sense of purpose to proceedings. Slathered in tattoos and cracking nary a smile throughout, he’s not an easily sympathetic presence, but his solemn demeanour lends gravity to the film’s otherwise credibility-defying pile-up of action set pieces.

Loosely adapted from the 2016 novel Three Minutes by Swedish crime-writing duo Roslund and Hellström, this largely British-funded production relocates the action from Colombia to a vaguely defined New York City, somewhat streamlining its international tangle of heavies: everyone’s indeterminately American save for the generically villainised Polish drug mafia.

After doing time for bar-brawling manslaughter, rough-hewn but goodhearted family man Pete Koslow (Kinnaman) wants a quiet life with his wife (Ana de Armas) and daughter.

The FBI has other plans for him, however: in exchange for early parole, he’s made to act as an undercover agent in various seamy, ill-organised narcotics busts. When one goes horribly wrong and an undercover cop is killed, Polish drug lord “the General” (Eugene Lipinski) determines that Pete must take the fall.