“The Infiltrator” is based on the true story of the US Customs official who helped take down a huge money laundering syndicate in the 1980s by going undercover and tracking all the Colombian drug money back and forth between Colombia and America via complicit banks set up both abroad and in America. While going undercover, though, this fella maybe starts to lose sight a little of who his friends really are and also seems to enjoy being this fake mob-associated kind of guy and also it is destroying his marriage and also he’s in a lot of danger because he got in over his head a little. But while that may seem like a lot to throw into a movie that is barely over two hours long, rest assured, it IS a lot, too much in fact, so that while this movie tries to be about a lot of things, it ends up being about nothing.

Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) has been going undercover for years and he’s tired of making so little progress in the war on drugs, so he convinces his bosses to allow him to take a different approach, one that we’ve all heard before in many contexts, which is to “follow the money.” By getting his foot in the door with Pablo Escobar’s people by presenting himself as a big time money launderer, he’s hoping to amass the evidence needed to find out what they do with their money, who it goes to, and how it gets back to them “clean.” He doesn’t get along with his partner Abreu (John Leguizamo) but that is an issue for all of one scene early on in the film and then they work together with no problems for the rest of the movie. So most of “The Infiltrator” is Mazur pretending to be some made up guy named Bob Musella, and he uses this alias to embed himself with the drug cartel, starting out low on their totem pole and slowly working his way up to their bigger bosses. Along the way, Mazur and Abreu are forced to involve an agent going undercover for her first time, Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), and the three of them work together to try to bust as many people at one time as possible.Continue Reading …