The Infiltrator

Undercover customs agent Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) helps bring down some of the banks that are laundering money for Colombian drug cartels. The movie is well acted (including by John Leguizamo, Diane Kruger and Amy Ryan as Cranston’s fellow agents; Juliet Aubrey as his wife; and Benjamin Bratt as a drug trafficker) and director Brad Furman gives a gritty sense of time and place (the 1980s in New York and Florida). But it’s all so familiar from other movies that it comes as a bit of a surprise to find that the story it tells is pretty close to what actually happened to Mazur and his cohorts. Writer Ellen Brown Furman (the director’s mother) barely hints at the true size and length of the investigation, and her script steps gingerly from one cliché to the next. Interesting story—but been here, seen this. J.L.