Based on a 1981 film of the same name, the espionage tale The Amateur is a movie filled with smart characters who are trapped in a movie that isn’t as smart as they are. Our protagonist Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is said to have an IQ of 170 and we believe it. He works five levels below the ground floor of the CIA headquarters in Decryption And Analysis, scrolling through endless lines of code and finding connections that no one else would see. He chats with an anonymous source he believes is in Eastern Europe, with whom he exchanges eyes-only files; if the premise of the hit show Severance was real, Charlie would be a prime candidate for the titular procedure. Throughout the film, he is consistently multiple steps ahead of those pursuing them, so much so that he outpaces director James Hawes and his screenwriters Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli in the process.
The opening of The Amateur has Charlie seeing his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) off as she heads to London for a conference. The next day, Charlie’s boss Director Moore (Holt McCallany) shares horrible news with him: Sarah has been killed after being held hostage by terrorists. Moore swears those responsible for her death will be held to account but Charlie doesn’t trust that the agency will avenge Sarah’s death the way he feels she deserves. In a bold move, to say the least, he threatens to leak classified material unless the CIA trains him as a field operative so he can carry out his revenge. With his back against the wall, Moore tasks Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) with turning the cerebral and diffident Charlie into a cold-blooded killer.
Because of the nature of the premise, The Amateur asks us to believe that one man — albeit a highly intelligent one — could evade a manhunt from one of the most formidable government agencies in the world. As Charlie’s rogue mission finds him traveling from numerous European countries, it becomes more unlikely that he would actually be able to continue his pursuit unabated. Along the way, a couple characters reappear to coerce Charlie to give up his dangerous undertaking but this feels like a much more kid-gloves approach than the CIA would take in actuality. These tactics spur on subsequent plot holes and leaps in logic that begin to add up, especially in the movie’s last 15 minutes; a character moment towards the very end actually made me cock my head to the side like a dog hearing a strange noise.
All of the performances in The Amateur are convincing but at the same time, none of the actors are being asked to do much outside of their current capabilities. Malek is doing a slight variation on his lead character in the tech thriller series Mr. Robot, although he has to dial up a bit more emotion into the flashback scenes between Charlie and Sarah. Oddly, Brosnahan is relegated to a stock “dead wife” role, even though she’s going to appear as the much more pivotal Lois Lane in Superman this summer. Talented supporting players like Julianne Nicholson and Jon Bernthal, the latter of whom is only in two scenes, are only given sketches of actual characters. More prominently, Fishburne has some fun zingers in his training sequences with Malek; “at point blank range, you might have a 50/50 shot at hitting something,” he smirks in front of a shooting target at a gun range.
The Amateur isn’t a bad movie from a technical perspective. Despite some misjudged shaky cam, it’s well-shot and edited in a way that makes its 2-hour runtime move along briskly. It’s just not a film that distinguishes itself enough from other revenge or spy films we’ve seen already. Its release comes just a few weeks after Black Bag, already one of the year’s best, which also follows spies chasing spies but does so with much more panache and thematic heft. This movie feels like it never expands on its initial hook of taking a lab rat out of his environment and placing him in a more menacing setting where his technological skills don’t mean nearly as much as killer instinct. The Amateur is professional enough on its surface but could use some training in developing a more robust storyline.
Score – 2.5/5
More new movies coming this weekend:
Playing in theaters is Drop, a mystery thriller starring Meghann Fahy and Brandon Sklenar, in which a widowed mother’s first date in years takes a terrifying turn when she’s bombarded with anonymous threatening text messages on her phone during their upscale dinner.
Also coming to theaters is Warfare, an action film starring D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai and Will Poulter, which follows a platoon of Navy SEALs in real-time as they embark on a mission through insurgent Iraqi territory in 2006.
Premiering on Amazon Prime is G20, an action thriller starring Viola Davis and Anthony Anderson, which finds the U.S. President defending her family and fellow world leaders when terrorists take over the G20 summit in South Africa.