Bryan Cranston hires himself to star in The Infiltrator, and it’s just one of the questionable decisions made from his exalted position as the film’s executive producer. In turn, we’re treated to a weirdly bloodless performance from the former Walter White, now playing the other side of the fence as Robert Mazur, the real-life U.S. customs man who went deep, deep, deep undercover in the mid-’80s to nail the money-laundering arm of the Medellín drug cartel in an extravagant and wildly risky sting.

Cranston’s stiff demeanour and stentorian delivery are presumably meant to convey how far out of his element the family man Mazur wandered in his role as Bob Musella, a hotshot businessman with the means to disinfect unholy amounts of money for cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar, largely through the notorious Bank of Credit and Commerce International. Instead, it’s like watching a stage actor in a boxy ’80s TV movie. As The Infiltrator begins, Cranston fails to make Mazur any more convincing as a small-time dealer whose cover is almost blown thanks to a plot device lifted from Brian De Palma’s Blow Out. Indeed, the film strains to dramatize Mazur’s actual experiences or the book that he penned, adapted here—with a painful surfeit of clunky exchanges—by first-time screenwriter (and director Brad Furman’s mom) Ellen Brown Furman. In 1988, after two years, Mazur’s true powers as a supernarc climaxed with a fake wedding for Bob Musella and the arrest of over 100 guests. It’s a great story, reduced by the tension-free Infiltrator to a lot of hacky performances by the likes of Benjamin Bratt, as a refined financier, and (worst of all) Amy Ryan, as Mazur’s cliché-spouting supervisor.

Still, and to its credit, The Infiltrator doesn’t shy away from exposing the tacit permission handed to the Bank of Credit and Commerce International by at least some major elements inside America’s deep political structure, even while it’s fudging the role played by Iran-Contra pilot Barry Seal (given a movie-stealing five minutes via an unrecognizable Michael Paré). It strives to deliver the painful truths of Sicario, but with none of that film’s vicious elegance.

Georgia Straight, August 2016