‘The Infiltrator’ keeps suspense high without letup

With just a dark flicker crossing his eyes, he somehow gives us his heart rate and his blood pressure.

Cranston, playing Robert Mazur, a real-life federal agent who infiltrated Pablo Escobar’s Colombian drug cartel, goes through the movie holding a tan suitcase.

The suitcase’s false top drops down to reveal a big reel-to-reel tape recorder — very dangerous technology that looks like something out of “Get Smart.”

Cranston is older, and so the movie rolls out a familiar and reliable device.

Here Mazur has just passed retirement age, but he decides to go on one last job, this time posing as a coat-and-tie mobster with an offer to the drug cartels:

Director Brad Furman does a nice job of suggesting this weird moral universe in subtle ways.

The people Mazur deals with tend to smile at the sight of pain and look puzzled at the slightest hint of tender feeling.

Either he puts all these people in prison, or he and his entire family are going to be killed, and they’ll probably be tortured first.

His partner on the inside (Leguizamo) is naturally blithe, an adrenaline junkie who likes to improvise.

[...] Kathy, the federal agent posing as Mazur’s fiancee, is on her first undercover assignment.

Instead of sitting there and smiling, she decides to be an extrovert, which means seeming open and authentic, the furthest thing from a person who’s hiding something.