The Infiltrator review: Bryan Cranston cranks it up in the hunt for Pablo Escobar’s money

During the 1980s US customs and drug enforcement agent Robert “Bob” Mazur went deep undercover as he, to use a well-worn deep undercover phrase, “followed the money”.

The cash in question belonged to infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. Mazur’s plan, an elaborate ruse that saw him impersonating a millionaire businessman, was to get in with dirty bankers who laundered millions of dollars on Escobar’s behalf.

In 2009, these escapades became a book called The Infiltrator: My Secret Life Inside the Dirty Banks Behind Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel. And here comes the "major motion picture" of same, as adapted for the screen by the director's mother, Ellen Brown Furman.

The good news is that Bryan Cranston, an actor who has a superb track record with leading onscreen double lives, plays Mazur, as the agent shuttles between his concerned wife (Amy Ryan, in an utterly thankless role) in suburbia and his glamorous new drug pals.

Mazur’s way in involves buddying up with loose-cannon new partner Emir (John Leguizamo) and a veritable parade of cops, robbers, bigger robbers and bankers, the most robberiest of all robbers.

It can be hard to keep track of who is doing what for whom in a film that works hard to truncate a major operation into movie speak (“Take them away, boys”) and familiar tropes (“Just Say No” commercials play on background TVs).

Nonetheless, occasionally smaller players really shine through: Joe Gilgun (late of Misfits and Emmerdale) is marvellous as Mazur's ex-con driver and Benjamin Bratt is sleekly charismatic as Robert Alcaino, the drug kingpin in Mazur's crosshairs, a drug kingpin, who, wouldn't you know it, couldn't do enough for you. Cue moral quandary.

Despite the viewer knowing (largely) where the film is headed, The Lincoln Lawyer director Brad Furman squeezes plenty of white-knuckle tension from the details: every scene featuring Bratt, Cranston and Mazur's fake fiancée (Diane Kruger) demands to be watched through fingers, lest somebody slip up and blow cover. Every encounter with omnisexual mobster Javier Ospina (Yul Vazquez) is hairy; a trip to a voodoo priest is hairier still.

For all these heightened mini-dramas, The Infiltrator feels pedestrian. Cranston gives it socks even when too many other players and things are swirling in flashy fast cuts around him. As with last year's Black Mass, this is an engaging saga but one that arrives after other genre films – say Scorsese's The Departed – have walked the same beat to more thrilling effect.