NO SPOILERS!!
Director: Brad Furman            
Year: 2016                   
Recommended: Yes!

It is a terrific film based on the true history of the American federal agent Robert Mazur. The direction is pretty good and it has an excellent cast that includes Diane Kruger, Bryan Cranston and John Leguizamo. It successfully portrayed the misery, violence, horror and fear caused by drug dealers. Those emotions are very difficult to show and transmit through a screen.

The film also presents the human side of policemen and federal agents; those people who work undercover risking their lives and their families to save millions of innocent people on the streets. Even though many of us consider them heroes, their job is not always recognised.

I want to highlight 2 sides of this story; the first one to mention the drug dealers’ effects on society. These guys can successfully mislead anyone as they have usually had difficult backgrounds and poor upbringings. They are seen as “celebrities” with the courage to fight against poverty. They could appear to have human emotions as they take care of their families and friends, but this is just a shield to hide their true nature. Drug dealers use peoples’ poverty as a weapon to turn them into ruthless assassins; adults, teenagers and even small kids are enlisted in their private armies. These criminals can turn themselves into fierce beasts when their money is in jeopardy. They can kill people without any regret, just to show their power over human life. In this world, even if you are not involved, you fear for your life every time a motorcycle pulls up next to you at the traffic lights because that is the preferred way that killers use to shoot someone and make a quick run.

On the other hand, the second side of the story is the complicity of the banking sector to help these criminals to launder their money. Some banks have received millions of dollars from these people without asking the origin of the cash deposits. Drug dealers were treated as special clients with people hired specially to manage their accounts. Do you think, are there now any banks that still receive dirty money?.

Well, if we add the fact that even governments are involved in this “business”, the picture is more and more complicated to draw.

Noteworthy quotations from this film:

• “ … nothing good ever comes in the absence of trust. Without it, there is no loyalty. And when there is no loyalty, it never ends well…”
• “… the biggest money launderer in the US [.. the] Federal Reserve Bank. It’s called the anonymous window. They accept pallet loads of cash that used to be drug pesos, hundreds of millions of dollars from my country’s central bank, no questions asked. If your government didn’t have my dirty money, your economy would collapse…”
• “…without family or friends, what kind of world would this be? There would be no reason to be alive..”