The Infiltrator | Little White Lies

The Infil­tra­tor

13 Sep 2016 / Released: 16 Sep 2016

Words by David Jenkins

Directed by Brad Furman

Starring Amy Ryan, Benjamin Bratt, and Bryan Cranston

Two adults, a man and a woman, seated at a table, conversing. The woman wears a patterned dress and the man wears a white shirt and dark jacket.
Two adults, a man and a woman, seated at a table, conversing. The woman wears a patterned dress and the man wears a white shirt and dark jacket.
2

Anticipation.

Frankly, this doesn’t look like it’s going to offer up something new.

2

Enjoyment.

And it really doesn’t. Unlike its undercover hero, plays it very safe.

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In Retrospect.

Bry – pick some more interesting, diverse projects willya?

A very nuts and bolts true-life police saga in which Bryan Cranston goes deep under­cov­er to foil a drug cartel.

If there was a best­selling non-fic­tion book called Sec­ond-Whack Police Thrillers for Dum­mies’, then direc­tor Brad Fur­man has read it cov­er to cov­er and inside out. The Infil­tra­tor is every bit as bland as its title would sug­gest, the mod­er­ate­ly glossy true life” tale of ultra-ded­i­cat­ed FBI man Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) who opts to go full Don­nie Bras­co in order to bring down a Columbian drug car­tel. The big game prize at the end of the hunt is Pablo Esco­bar him­self, but you can’t just take a pot-shot at the king – you’ve got to play the long game.

The process of going under­cov­er – the sen­si­tiv­i­ties, the details, the wor­ries – is glazed over, as Cranston sim­ply trans­forms between the edits. There’s no sense of how he builds a per­sona or slides into char­ac­ter. One sequence in which he’s trad­ing triv­ia with his pre­tend wife (Amy Ryan) makes it feel like a film is a quaint caper about two peo­ple attempt­ing to sneak into Canada.

It set­tles into some kind of grove by about the half-way point, where Mazur dis­cov­ers that not every­one tan­gen­tial­ly involved in large-scale nar­cot­ic import/​export is a low-life shit-weasel who deserves to have the book thrown at them. Close to the top of the tree, he con­nects with Ben­jamin Bratt’s Rober­to Alcaino and his delight­ful­ly gor­geous wife (Ele­na Anaya). They are cul­tured and refined. They sup wine from over­sized crys­tal glass­es, and chop veg­eta­bles (for fun!) instead of call­ing on a maid or cook to do so. These are just nor­mal folks tan­gled up in soci­ety-dam­ag­ing vice, maybe to a lev­el they don’t quite com­pre­hend. What­ev­er, the pair’s fast friend­ship becomes the nag­ging sinew that pre­vents Mazur from mak­ing a clean break from his under­cov­er life.

Even when grind­ing through stock moves like the loco inner-cir­cle wild card who needs to be, ahem, silenced, to the big-col­lared psy­chopath who might have twigged on to the ruse, the film nev­er attempts to bring any­thing inter­est­ing into the con­ver­sa­tion. The ghost of Wal­ter White looms large over Cranston’s char­ac­ter, an essen­tial­ly sim­ple, white-bread fam­i­ly man who dares to wade into a world whose man­i­fold dan­gers he’s ill-pre­pared to deal with. A more-than-able char­ac­ter actor, let’s hope that it’s soon­er rather than lat­er that Cranston finds a cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tor who is able match his tal­ents rather than water­ing them down.

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