The Infiltrator is a Bryan Cranston vehicle from a parallel universe. Instead of playing a good-guy-turns-bad exploring the dark underbelly of drug trafficking, Cranston plays a more simple, though still layered, variation of the good guy: an undercover agent on the verge of retirement doing “one last job” to nab the most dangerous, high-powered figures involved in the U.S. drug business.
Cranston plays real-life U.S. Customs Service agent Robert Mazur, who famously “followed the money” in his undercover investigation of Pablo Escobar’s organization, which lead to the arrests of several high-status money launderers. Thanks to Mazur’s investigation, the U.S. government even took down the Bank of Credit and Commerce International.
Follow the drugs, and you only discover pawns and middle men, alerting the higher up to change their ways, Manzur says to his boss, Bonni Tischler (Amy Ryan). But follow the money, and you’ll find the rats at the top of the circus masterminding it all. The deeper he gets, the more dangerous Mazur’s final undercover assignment as sleazy rich businessman “Bob Musella” gets, to the chagrin of his stereotypically nagging wife Evelyn (Juliet Aubrey).
Mazur draws the line, though, when his new “business partners” pressure him to have intercourse with a stripper, claiming he has a fiancée – a bad move in the eyes of fellow undercover agent Emir Abreu (John Leguizamo). Tischler helps cover that one up by assigning newbie agent Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), whose trophy-wife-like qualities make her the perfect agent to play “fiancée.”
Ertz and Mazur fake their way into the good graces of another power couple, Roberto and Gloria Alcaino (Benjamin Bratt and Elena Anaya), who are privileged enough to launder money and remain blissfully ignorant of the ugly consequences of what they’re funding. The amount of leisure time Ertz and Mazur spend with the Alcainos in order to finish the job leads the agents to experience numerous identity problems – the film smartly avoids the trap of having them fall in love on assignment, instead focusing on the more simple pleasures of friendship with the Alcainos, who treat them supremely well in their lovely, relaxing estate.
If The Infiltrator focused on the dynamic between these couples – the genuine friendship that blossoms, the guilt Ertz and Mazur feel about their betrayal, their temptation to not finish the job – the film would have been a much more poignant drama. Cut out all of the contrived Scorsese imitations, the forgettable, dick-swaggering drug lords, the montages of money flowing through the pipes as Cranston’s thick, whiskey-tinged croon charms his business partners, the Russian Roulette interrogations in which characters question each other’s allegiance, and you get a much more elegant and interesting film about loyalty and trust that doesn’t have to spell it out.
The beautiful, suspenseful scenes between Ertz, Mazur and the Alcainos are more in the surreal key of The Counselor or Miami Vice, at odds with the rest of the film’s contrived plotting. Unfortunately, The Infiltrator isn’t some auteur’s vision of Mazur’s operation, it’s a dutiful adaptation of the agent’s memoir, incorporating as many realistic details from the story as it can possibly shoehorn in. The film seems to have forgotten, however, that it’s still a movie, not a documentary – a detrimental misfire that cancels out its own charms.