The Infiltrator

Cert: 15A. Now showing.

The Irish actor and writer Mark O’Halloran recently mused to me that Bryan Cranston came from the clowning tradition of acting, all exaggerated movements rather than seamless immersion into a role. Go back to Malcolm In The Middle and O’Halloran’s logic is plain to see. While it suits such fare and even Breaking Bad’s more camp moments, it has an adverse effect with more conventional outings such as this rather by-numbers biopic of undercover fed Robert Mazur’s grapples with the Medellin Cartel. You look at Cranston playing the role and you don’t see an inhabited depiction of Mr Mazur. You see Cranston playing the role.

Mazur was a US Customs Special Agent who in 1986 hatched a plan to follow the money trail of Pablo Escobar’s drug empire. To do this, he went undercover, posing as a big-league money launderer called Bob Musella. The former IRS accountant had to cosy up to lethally dangerous cartel men, with help from fellow agent Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger) posing as his wife, and record conversations via a rigged briefcase.

Like any such project, The Infiltrator shamelessly exploits the cheesy fashions of the era — the hair, the collars, the aviators — and liberally chucks in music that fits this narrative. It spends an hour saying “look at how different things were,” before any real threat and danger are brought to the screenplay.

For these annoyances, it is hard to stay too mad at The Infiltrator. The adaptation by Brad Furman (The Lincoln Lawyer) of his mother Ellen’s screenplay is a serviceable if slightly forgettable retread of the undercover genre. John Leguizamo makes a welcome outing as Mazur’s more “street” partner and our own Tom Vaughan-Lawlor (Love/Hate) slips into the Hollywood dimension seamlessly as a fellow fed agent.