[yasr_overall_rating]
A U.S. Customs official uncovers a money laundering scheme involving Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar.
When a movie claims to be “based on a true story,” I always wonder just how loosely they use the term “based.” Is it really close to what happened or is it more like, welllll none of these events actually happened but something similar (and much less exciting) did. Since the screenplay was taken from the real-life Robert Mazur’s memoir of his experiences while taking down the single biggest drug cartel in the world, I was hoping for some really deep insight into the world of drugs and the money it produces. Eh, not so much.
In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar’s Medellin cartel provided 70-80% of all cocaine in the United States estimated at $400,000,000 per year to the cartel. The screenplay, written by Ellen Brown Furman, streamlines the book well, making the entire movie a slow creep into a dramatic story with blasting moments of disturbing violence.
Bryan Cranston, of “Breaking Bad” fame, stars as Bob Mazur, a successful undercover DEA agent in one of the main drug trafficking ports from South America, Tampa, Florida. He is offered retirement after the simple bust of a low-level pusher goes bad and he is wounded. Mazur turns it down and suddenly decides he should be attempting to infiltrate the top rung of the biggest and most elaborate drug cartel that America had ever seen. How he made that jump in his mind is never explained nor really even explored. Actually, that is the first of many things that are neither explained nor explored. His new undercover identity is Bob Musella, a man who specializes in money laundering. He is coupled with a guy who gets a little too much pleasure from playing the part of a cartel op, Emir (John Leguizamo, in probably the best performance he’s given). When Bob refuses a happy ending in the champagne room of a strip club while meeting with a Medellin lieutenant, he makes up a fiancée on the spot, and thus his double life now includes a DEA agent fiancée, Kathy (Diane Kruger), much to the dismay of Bob’s real life wife (Juliet Aubrey). The whole double life thing plays out much as expected but without the clichéd breakdown of the family that Bob seems to go home to almost every night. Deep cover means just that… deep. I had trouble believing that his wife knew as much as she did and that he would have that much contact with her during all this time.
Speaking of time, there really isn’t any. We really get no sense of how much time passes during the different scenes of Bob getting the trust of the big boys in the cartel. It could have been a year or more but the way the movie was edited, it could have easily been 3-4 weeks because everything just seems to flow to Bob. There really is no stress as he finally moves up to the number two man in the cartel, Roberto Alcaino, delightfully played by Benjamin Bratt. Bratt saunters around the screen with the air of an accomplished businessman, never giving any hints to the pile of bodies he has left behind to get there. According to the script, winning Alcaino’s trust is as easy as introducing him to Bob’s aunt (Olympia Dukakis essentially re-playing her wonderful character from “Steel Magnolias”) to remind Roberto of his own feisty aunt. What did stand out to me was just how easily he was able to bring along the bank execs into the money launder.
At the time, BCCI was the eighth largest privately owned bank in the world. It actually secretly bought American Bancshares based in Washington DC. After it was made public that BCCI regularly laundered billions of money for Escobar and others, the bank eventually failed.
The whole movie is good enough to spend an afternoon with but there really isn’t anything outstanding other than the performances of Cranston and John Leguizamo. Leguizamo trades in his stand-up comic gig for a role as intense as it can be. He pulls off the role of drug pusher/runner as perfectly believable. I’m sure growing up he encountered more than one of these guys because it seems so natural to him. His performance should bring some award nominations but he might be overlooked as it being ‘not really a stretch’ for him as an actor. I disagree but I don’t get invited to those meetings. His real problem is that his character is pretty much dismissed from the film after the ‘relationship’ between Bob and Roberto is established. There is an attempt to portray how close those two get to be, even to the point of Bob sort of wishing Roberto could get away in the end. I never believed it. I did not understand how this powerful drug lord did not have suspicions of this American. The script just wasn’t there. Maybe the studios should have hired someone other than director Brad Furman’s mom to write the script.
Bryan Cranston is as intense as he ever was in Breaking Bad and his performance is a solid as a rock. His dialogue is spot on and delivers with complete believability. Unfortunately, the script is just too lightweight to provide anything but just a good solid performance. He is never given the opportunity to delve into the emotional conflicts that leading this double life puts him through. When he is almost caught in his real life with his wife, he has to pretend to be a bad ass, much to the dismay of a poor waiter in a fine restaurant. The violence seems so out of character for either side of Bob that I almost expected him to return to the restaurant and apologize to the kid. The writing did not support the character.
“The Infiltrator” is an interesting little history lesson that nobody really had any intention of exploring. Scenes just happened, one after the other with not a whole lot research as to what and why. Kinda like a lecture in high school, where all you are worried about, are the names so you can pick them out on the next multiple choice quiz.
In theaters Friday, July 15th
