Powerful Exit By Renfro [SPOILERS]

For me the big question mark overshadowing Renfro's performance was his jittery, agitated character. He played a bellhop who appeared to be in withdrawal from an addiction which (I now know) Renfro was battling in real life and which killed him shortly after completing this film. I thought Renfro had one of the best lines in the movie, "to make it in this town you have to willing to do some really awful things".

His performance affected me greatly: the torment he projected trying to stave off the pedophile who showed up to take possession of the kidnapped little boy that Rourke's Uncle Pete had "sold" like a slab of meat to a human predator; wresting the knife from Rourke to finish off the kid before the human traffickers returned to "collect" and kill off any witnesses; mutilating himself to fool Rourke into believing he had done the deed so he could buy the boy time to escape; wiping the blood off as the van rolled away, uncertain if he had sealed his own fate by not carrying out Rourke's order. I'm sorry we won't see more of this gifted young actor who left the stage too soon.

If the movie suffered at all, it was due to the editing-out of crucial scenes that would have fleshed out the characters and made their motivations more understandable.

The Informers is a flawed but powerful piece of film making.