Now Bryan's the good guy: Breaking Bad star Cranston goes undercover to tackle war on drugs in The Infiltrator

By Brian Viner For The Daily Mail

Published: 19:17 EST, 15 September 2016 | Updated: 21:38 EST, 15 September 2016

The Infiltrator (15)

Verdict: Decent thriller 

Rating:

For those like me who sat devotedly through five series of the wonderful TV drama Breaking Bad, it is still ever so slightly disconcerting to find its star, Bryan Cranston — brilliant actor though he is — in other roles.

And here’s one that is especially disorientating, because like the TV show that made him famous, The Infiltrator is about the war on drugs, except with Cranston playing a family man who stays good, not one who turns bad.

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War on drugs: John Leguizamo, Ruben Ochandiano, Bryan Cranston in The Infiltrator

War on drugs: John Leguizamo, Ruben Ochandiano, Bryan Cranston in The Infiltrator

This is Bob Mazur, a real-life U.S. customs agent, on whose memoir the film is based.

In the mid-Eighties, Mazur went undercover in an attempt to nail the Colombian cocaine lord Pablo Escobar, and more particularly those who helped him to launder hundreds of millions of dirty dollars through legitimate banks and businesses. Sporting a Tom Selleck moustache, Cranston is superb in the title part, infiltrating Escobar’s inner circle in the guise of Bob Musella, a charismatic tycoon who joins the money-laundering operation and befriends some of Escobar’s main lieutenants.

John Leguizamo and Diane Kruger are terrific, too, as his accomplices-in-crime-busting, the latter playing his fake fiancee. Also, a scene-stealing Olympia Dukakis pops up twice, playing Bob’s incorrigible aunt.

There are three plot strands: can Bob reconcile his happy family life with his perilous day job; will he be compromised by his growing affection for one of the bad guys; and, above all, will they catch him before he catches them?

Crime buster: Diane Kruger plays Cranston's fake fiancee when he goes undercover

Crime buster: Diane Kruger plays Cranston's fake fiancee when he goes undercover

I was moderately gripped by all this, but The Infiltrator never quite propelled me to the edge of my seat.

Part of the problem is that it is almost impossible to believe that the cartel bosses would not have done due diligence on Musella, digging into his past, talking to his associates.

Also, director Brad Furman is a little too intent on giving us a history lesson about Reagan-era America.

But if not in the first rank of undercover thrillers, it’s still a decent film, worth a visit to the cinema, and it comes with a lovely, wholesome footnote: the screenplay is by Ellen Brown Furman, the director’s old mum.

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