By TeeJay Small
| Published 31 seconds ago
I don’t think any actor has ever gotten a bigger career bump from a television finale than Bryan Cranston. Once Breaking Bad wrapped in 2013, Cranston began popping up all over the place in movies, TV shows, television ads, and Broadway plays. While many of his post-Heisenberg roles are excellent, my favorite underrated Cranston performance has to be the leading role in 2016’s The Infiltrator. The movie made a small splash at the box office and ultimately failed to make back its budget, but it stands up really well on a rewatch now that it’s streaming on Hulu.
As a massive Breaking Bad fan, I distinctly recall catching The Infiltrator in theaters and gasping as I discovered the premise. The film is a biographical crime drama based on the true story of the men who went undercover to take down infamous drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. Cranston leads the cast as United States Customs Service Special Agent Robert Mazur, based on the real-life Mazur’s recollection of events. Diane Kruger, John Leguizamo, Yul Vazquez, and The Office‘s Amy Ryan round out the cast.
In case it doesn’t immediately leap out to you, I found this movie hilarious for the mere fact that Cranston was flipping the script on his Breaking Bad persona. On the hit AMC TV show, he portrayed a timid, mild-mannered suburbanite who led a double life as a violent drug lord. In The Infiltrator, Cranston is a rough-around-the-edges badass who weasels his way into Escobar’s crew in order to bust him and take down the entire operation. For fans of the show, this is like Walter White and Hank Schrader merging into a single mustachioed individual.
Even if you’ve never seen Breaking Bad, there’s plenty to enjoy about The Infiltrator. The story is quite gripping, the performances are top-notch, and the cinematography leaves your head spinning. I distinctly recall walking out of the theater back in 2016 thinking it was going to be a hit, so you can imagine my surprise when nobody was talking about it at the water cooler the following week. The Infiltrator currently touts a middling 72 percent critic score on Rotten Tomatoes as well, so I might just have very niche taste.
If I had to guess why The Infiltrator underperformed, I’d say it’s probably because it tells a similar story to the Netflix series Narcos, if a bit more condensed. Narcos is also about taking down Escobar, though the series focuses more on the life of the kingpin and his ultimate demise, giving viewers a much fuller picture of events. The movie, by contrast, concludes when Escobar is caught and arraigned in the late 1980s, as that’s when Robert Mazur’s work concluded. History buffs will note that Escobar ultimately managed to escape from prison during the early 1990s, and live the rest of his life on the run.
If you were one of the lucky few who caught this film in theaters ten years ago, why not give it another spin today? Alternatively, this might be the perfect time for a first-time viewer to sit down and catch The Infiltrator on Hulu.
