Bryan Cranston is one of those actors who can take subpar material and make it something special through sheer will and talent. That's the case with his latest, a true crime thriller wherein the veteran actor plays U.S. Customs agent Robert Mazur.
In The Infiltrator, Mazur is an undercover money launderer for Pablo Escobar’s Miami operation. The Colombian Don is only briefly glimpsed, so, while the film treads on some familiar ground, the approach and this story will be new to nearly everyone in the theater. With his latest, Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) tries to craft a drama that is at once exciting and thoughtful—a goal he mostly accomplishes.
Helping Cranston’s cause in the acting department is John Leguizamo, the master of loose cannons, as Mazur’s partner Emir Abreu. Predictably, the straight-laced family man Mazur butts heads with the wild card Abreu, and both actors do some of the film’s best work then they’re arguing over how to not get killed by the cartel.
Also bringing the goods is a bevy of talented supporting performers, including Diane Kruger and Juliet Aubrey as, respectively, Mazur’s fake wife and real wife. But if there’s one performer who manages to wrest the screen away from the masterful Cranston, it’s Joe Gilgun as criminal-turned-kinda-sorta-good guy Dominic. Gilgun, a Brit previously seen in Pride and on Preacher, provides some comic relief and a great repartee with Cranston, and shows he can do just about anything on the big or small screen. That being said, he may want to act alongside Cranston as much as he can.
Fans of Breaking Bad will find some intriguing thematic overlap here, and, if you’re a mega-fan like me, it’s fun to view this movie as a companion story to Bad. Whereas Walter White started out as a family man left with no other options, Robert Mazur signs up for the dangerous Escobar mission even though he has a full-benefits retirement option on the table. He gets high off of the thrill of danger, even if he doesn’t fully comprehend the extent of the danger. As he becomes more like the men he’s supposed to put away, one of Breaking Bad’s most enthralling questions bubbles to the surface: How long can you play the part of the monster before you become one? It’s a question that The Infiltrator poses, struggles to answer, then appears to dump by the wayside as the result of some poor editing.
Several confusing subplots and relationships—Mazur and his unusual aunt (Olympia Dukakis), Mazur and famed smuggler Barry Seal—rear their heads sporadically throughout the two-plus hour running time, then get lost in the shuffle as the film tries to tackle too many big ideas. Furman has ambition, but he doesn’t have the support to pull it all off.
In the hands of a more capable editor and writer, The Infiltrator had the potential to soar. Luckily, when it shoots for the moon, Cranston ensures that it lands amongst the stars.
