The Infiltrator

As much as I would like to say that The Infiltrator marks Bryan Cranston’s return to the Shakespearean grandstanding of Walter White, it does not. It’s not even a return to Benny Blanco’s Bronx heyday for John Leguizamo. Instead, this film is a perfectly passable bargain-basement neo-noir thwarted by its aspirations to third-tier Scorsese status, and it’s that very sense of strained self-seriousness that undermines whatever pulpy fun might’ve been mined from the film’s salacious source material.

Cranston is the only real draw here, and his performance as a deep-cover customs agent does have its high points, most notably a pie-(or cake-)in-the-face routine with an unfortunate waiter. Leguizamo is appropriately slimy, but he’s all but forgotten in the third act. The problem with The Infiltrator has little to do with acting and a lot more to do with literally everything else.
While Cranston and Leguizamo do their dead-level best to elevate the material they’ve been given — ably supported by Olympia Dukakis, Amy Ryan and Benjamin Bratt — the cast is utterly failed by inept direction and a terrible screenplay. Whether this is due to simple inexperience or outright incompetence on the part of director Brad Furman and screenwriter Ellen Brown Furman is a question of little relevance considering the overall ineptitude of the resultant work. And, if you suspected a family connection behind the similar surnames in that pairing, you were not mistaken, as this film is the result of a son directing his mother’s first screenplay. (If my mom had handed me this script, I would’ve told her to take another pass at it.)

Furman the Younger has a proven track record of putting A-list talent in B-movie melodramas, having most recently paired Ben Affleck with Justin Timberlake in the abysmal Runner Runner, preceded by coaxing Matthew McConaughey into the largely forgettable The Lincoln Lawyer. Furman’s directorial style, or lack thereof, predominantly consists of abusing the extreme closeup and visual flourishes that clearly indicate the influence of better directors — without an adequate understanding of what made them good in the first place. Many of his more extravagant setups look as though they would be more at home in a made-for-TV movie, and those constant closeups read like the cinematic equivalent of an email typed in all caps.

As mediocre as the direction is, it’s the screenplay that provides the greatest cause for complaint. One could be forgiven for mistaking Mama Furman’s script with a poorly translated foreign language dub with her laughable use of profanity doing a great disservice to a genre typically defined by its celebratory profusion of expletives. But the pacing is the real killer here. An interminably long and overwrought second act does nothing to enhance character development, and the rate at which the plot advances could be easily bested in a race with a glacier riding a drunken snail. All of this culminates in a thoroughly absurd faux-wedding climax that has all the earmarks of a novice screenwriter who read too much Syd Field and decided that only weddings or funerals could provide appropriate endings. For a movie stretching over two hours to rely entirely on Animal House-style captions for its denouement is absolutely unacceptable.

As a somewhat mindless crime thriller, The Infiltrator could have worked. It’s not the worst true-crime adaptation out there, but there are better ways to spend your time and money this weekend — unless you absolutely have to see a mainstream release and the new Ghostbusters isn’t your thing. What was intended to be a high-concept hybrid of Scarface and The Departed ended up somewhere closer to Miami Vice fan-fiction. There is, however, something inherently interesting about watching a mother and son fail together in similar fashion, as both Furmans ape their influences to a fault. Just because an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree doesn’t mean you should eat it. Rated R for strong violence, language throughout, some sexual content and drug material

Now playing at UA Beaucatcher and Carolina Cinemark