Brad Furman gave us the smart LA thriller The Lincoln Lawyer starring Matthew McConaughey in 2011, which got me wondering if he shouldn’t be taking on adaptations of Elmore Leonard or Carl Hiaasen. Now he directs this stodgy, shapeless and almost endless Miami drug-ring drama starring its executive producer, Bryan Cranston. It feels like playing five hours of Grand Theft Auto. The Infiltrator is adapted from the memoir by Robert Mazur, a federal agent who went undercover among Colombian druglords associated with Pablo Escobar and helped bring down his crooked banking infrastructure; the screenwriter who adapted Mazur’s book is the director’s mother: Ellen Brown Furman. Cranston does a reasonable job as Mazur, the veteran undercover operative and happily married man who almost betrays himself at a nightclub by priggishly refusing a blow-job from one of the lapdancers the bad guys have hired. He feels constrained to invent a fiancee to explain away his bad manners, so Mazur’s exasperated bosses have to provide him with one: Agent Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger), who in turn has interesting ideas about developing and using their fake relationship. The movie is a little like Ted Demme’s Blow (2001), another madly indulgent and interminable cocaine drama. Cranston’s talent – and Furman’s – go a little to waste.
