The Infiltrator (2016)

 

I'll stick to "based on a true story" setting for this week too. "The Infiltrator" is yet another movie set in the context of the high cocaine traffic period of the '80s dominated by Pablo Escobar and the Colombian cartel. 

The story here, as the title says, is an infiltration action within the criminal organization led by a US customs agent under cover. The movie is dense, mixing the two parallel lives of the protagonist. The first, a quiet existence with his family, besides the second, under constant threat posing as a business man offering his services for laundering millions of dollars coming out from the drug sales. In brief, we have all the ingredients of the genre, interceptions, informers, assassinations, etc., the final hystorical significant consequence being the fall of BCCI, the seventh commercial bank in the world at the time, and apparently one of the main financial institutions involved in the transfers of funds to the Colombian organization.

The movie has all the required elements for a top title, with the exception of somebody to know how to combine these properly = the direction fails, or at least that's what I felt. It gives the impression of an unfinished product. Although the subject offers a lot, the narrative is not properly balanced, sometimes seeming either exaggerated or superficial. The actors cast are doing their job well, with Bryan Cranston visibly trained for the role here by the part he played in "Breaking Bad". However, at some times you feel a bit of overacting, and again it's rather more the fault of the direction where it looks like saving on the number of takes shot for a scene.

To wrap up, I can't end this without making a quick reference to a long series in the same line with what we have here. We can start with "Donnie Brasco" from '97, where Johnny Depp acts as an undercover FBI agent infiltrated in the New York mafia, and we can continue with "Blow" from 2001, with the same Johnny Depp as a smuggler working for the Colombian cartel. In "Kill the Messenger" from 2014, Jeremy Renner plays a journalist who investigates the CIA involvement in the drug traffic of the time, and in "American Made" from 2017, Tom Cruise is Barry Seal, another smuggler working for the same group turned informer, a character who we briefly meet here too. The list can be much longer, but I reduced to titles directly linked with the subject in "The Infiltrator". Where's my point, is that neither of the above is a bad movie, but out of all I think only "Kill the Messenger" would rank below "The Infiltrator". To conclude: if you like this one, you should better check the other three ;)

Rating: 3.5 out of 5