Plot points for The Infiltrator, opening today, discussed below.
There's a long tracking shot toward the end of The Infiltrator that earns back a great deal of goodwill that had been squandered through the previous 110 minutes or so.
The camera begins in the dressing area of a wedding, where Customs agents Robert Mazur (Bryan Cranston) and Kathy Ertz (Diane Kruger) receive last minute instructions from their bosses before they are to exchange sham vows in front of a variety of criminals. Drug importers and drug dealers and the bankers who launder all of their dirty money have gathered here today to bless this phony union, unaware that they're about to be sold out by a man they've come to trust and, in some cases, even love.
The camera winds its way through the country club, spinning and turning and giving us all a bit of vertigo as we get a very real sense of just how dangerous Mazur's double life is. Killers commingle with cops, getting drunk on champagne while they wait for the service to begin. There's a palpable sadness to Mazur's triumph, as a Chilean-born drug importer who had escaped a bust days earlier shows up to the wedding. Robert and Kathy had gotten close to the lieutenant of Pablo Escobar in the course of their investigation, spending a great deal of time getting intimately acquainted with the man and his wife. This is the first time Roberto Alcaino (Benjamin Bratt) will have seen his bride and kids since narrowly escaping arrest. It is the last time he will see them before spending a good portion of the rest of his life in prison.
Mazur's double life as chronicled in The Infiltrator was a legal triumph, culminating in one of the biggest takedowns in the history of the war on drugs. It was also a personal and psychological disaster, one that forced the Customs agent to make people love him before he screwed them over. And we need that long tracking shot at the end to drive the point home, because the rest of the film is a rather rote retelling of Mazur's story, one that hits the high points and conveys the basic facts while rarely making us feel for Mazur's plight or peril.
Cranston is excellent, as always, and John Leguizamo provides a sort of high-tension comic relief as his close-to-the-edge partner. But the whole thing feels so by-the-numbers that it's hard to get too invested in the proceedings.