TV Reviews : ‘The Infiltrator’ Enters Neo-Nazi World

HBO’s newest movie, “The Infiltrator,” at once delivers a warning about neo-Nazism and undermines that message through weak execution.

Based on Yaron Svoray and Nick Taylor’s non-fiction book, “In Hitler’s Shadow,” it too often lacks the intensity one should expect from a teleplay (by Guy Andrews) that details a perilous undercover probe of skinheads and their race-supremacist allies in modern Germany.

The sleuth here is free-lance Israeli journalist Yaron Svoray (Oliver Platt), who becomes a trusted pal of these neo-Nazis in order to expose them and the police’s apparent tolerance of them, ultimately on behalf of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies in Los Angeles. While playing the role of Nazi sympathizer, Svoray becomes a witness to horrific violence aimed at immigrants living in Berlin, and he can do nothing to stop the near-fatal victimization of a close Turkish friend. Nor do the German authorities appear eager to stop these criminal activities.

The most interesting character here is not Svoray but Gunther Fischer, an older middle-class neo-Nazi and jovial family man who supports the skinheads’ agenda but not their murderous tactics. In spite of what the man stands for, Svoray befriends him and admits that he likes him, an interesting subtext that is undeveloped.

In contrast to the relatively benign Fischer are scenes depicting extreme violence and another small chunk of the film in which skinheads watch a home video of themselves raping and murdering a foreign girl.

“The Infiltrator” hits ponderous low gear when the story increasingly tilts toward the Wiesenthal Center but fails to firmly link these German lunatics with their extreme right-wing counterparts in the U.S. Moreover, director John Mackenzie fails to elevate the story’s level of suspense above a monotone murmur, one reason being that Svoray’s acceptance by the skinheads is so swift (even though they joke that he looks like a Jew) as to be comical. Even when he openly hangs out with a cop and a Turk, and appears to expose himself in other ways, the skinheads don’t get the message. Dumb but dangerous, apparently.

* “The Infiltrator” airs at 8 tonight on HBO.