The exclamation point in the title of “The Informant!” is on purpose. So, too, is the harsh light, hammering down from the acoustic tile ceilings, glaring in the windows like a nuclear winter, reflecting off the big, boxy K-Cars in the parking lot outside. And so’s every detail of leading man Matt Damon’s look — scrubby ginger mustache, the late-’80s new wave ties he worries about Customs stopping him for, his slight paunch pressing against his un-tailored shirts. It’s 1992, and Mark Whitacre could be a hapless Bayside substitute teacher in “Saved By the Bell.”Instead, he’s a biochemist for Archer Daniels Midland. Not the kind who wears a white lab coat, but the kind who does international business, daydreams about good locations for outlet shops and probably says “touch base” instead of “call.” Whitacre studied selenium in school, the stuff in egg whites and brazil nuts. As an executive, he works with lysine, an additive in animal feed.Just when you think a more numbing platform for a movie couldn’t be possible, the FBI charges in, investigating corporate crime. Whitacre decides to be the man with the white hat — likening himself to the kind of guy who shows up with “the pot roast and the warm coat” when someone loses their home in a flood — and tell them everything. (Agent Brian Shepard has a great line as he briefs his co-workers on what’s going on: “A pound of bacon, a peanut butter sandwich, some vitamins — anything that ADM has a hand in — it’s all fixed, that’s what he’s telling me. Basically, everyone in this country is the victim of corporate crime by the time they finish breakfast.”) Maybe, after all the dust settles, Whitacre thinks, they’ll see how good he was, how he just wanted the company to be pure and true, and they’ll make him president, right?

Thus are the thought processes of an unlikely spy and trickster who ponders Merino wool, the texture of avocados and — in an overly Chuck Palahniuk-y way, butterflies who might have poison wings, self-aware polar bears who cover their noses to fish, and the sociological ripples when you save someone from choking in a restaurant.

But as Whitacre’s half-truths and half-attempts at white-hattery continue to unravel and heap upon themselves, it’s hard to care about what happens to Whitacre. (Not only that, but the movie gets as jagged as its bipolar hero, distracting us with musical cues that start out jazzy and end up in hoedown land, with kazoos accompanying a raid). He was sort of a slimy, boring, light-beer drinking Decatur snooze to begin with. You’d think a mental chem-geek double-agent with a thing for “The Firm,” embezzling money and ratting for the feds would be a little more interesting. And by all accounts, Damon makes this movie — his supporting actors are fine talents, but they’re given little more direction than “look exasperated at Whitacre’s latest helping of B.S.”

Had there been some twist at the end, some indication that we misjudged some part of the story, or that there was still some mystery left in what we’d seen, “The Informant!” could have been vastly more entertaining. You wouldn’t have even had to inject any fictional flying-through-the-air-shooting-two-guns-going-”Argh!” nonsense. The world where everything gets put back where it belongs, every criminal serves his full sentence, everyone gets a pot roast and a warm coat and everyone ends up behaving themselves doesn’t exist outside of children’s picture books. The beginning promised truth — and while the adaptation might get away with calling itself that, it’s certainly not truth with an exclamation point.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in theaters anymore.