‘Infiltrator’: Crime saga could have used more time

Published 1:30 am Friday, July 15, 2016

If anybody can savor name-above-the-title movie stardom, it’s a lifelong character actor. Maybe that’s why Bryan Cranston looks so jazzed in “The Infiltrator.”

After years of paying his dues, Cranston “arrived” with his acclaimed performance over five seasons of “Breaking Bad.” That success led to an Oscar nomination for his title role in “Trumbo” last year, and now the lead in a crime drama, “The Infiltrator.”

If this effective film, based on a true story, were really done right, it would be 10 or 12 hours of longform TV. That’s probably the best format for the sprawling saga of a mid-1980s effort to dismantle the drug empire of kingpin Pablo Escobar.

There’s already a longform take on Escobar’s story, “Narcos.” “The Infiltrator” is told from law enforcement’s point of view.

Our focus is on Tampa Customs agent Robert Mazur (Cranston, at times recalling the great character actor Warren Oates), who goes undercover as a high-rolling money launderer. His goal was not to catch Escobar but to disrupt the international banks that enabled the Medellin cartel to flourish.

Director Brad Furman (“The Lincoln Lawyer”) gets in some potent scenes. There’s a fine sequence in which Mazur’s two worlds unexpectedly collide, as he takes out his long-suffering wife (Juliet Aubrey) for an anniversary dinner. The arrival of a gangland figure who knows Mazur only as his boorish alter ego makes things tense for a while.

In his undercover life, Mazur has a fiancée (Diane Kruger, believably focused), who becomes very helpful when dealing with lethal but sentimental criminals like the smoothie played by Benjamin Bratt.

The movie relies on the discomfort of befriending bad guys and then, ultimately, betraying them. Just once I’d like to see an undercover movie where the cop doesn’t fret for a second about betraying the trust of the rotten people he sets up. That was the whole point, after all.

The film is nicely cast overall, with John Leguizamo as a scruffy Customs agent, Elena Anaya as Bratt’s soulful wife, and Yul Vazquez as a sexually free-thinking money man (one of the more bizarre characters in recent memory). With more time on screen, these figures could develop, and we’d have more sense of the years passing.

“The Infiltrator” doesn’t have much nuance; when there’s a Scorsese-like montage of how drug money gets laundered, the accompanying song is, inevitably, Curtis Mayfield’s “Pusherman.” Everything’s on the nose like that. But for a two-hour take on a complicated sting, it gets the job done.

“The Infiltrator” 2 1/2 stars

A Customs agent (Bryan Cranston) goes undercover to disrupt the international banks that launder money for the notorious drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. This potent 1980s crime saga needs more time to develop, but it generally gets the job done.

Rating: R, for violence, language

Showing: Alderwood Mall, Marysville, Meridian, Sundance Cinemas, Thornton Place, Woodinville, Cascade Mall