The Amateur Review

The Amateur dares to ask a bizarre question: Who can kill people in movies? Can soft-spoken, nebbish, straight-laced Rami Malek terminate the lives of half a dozen thinking, feeling humans, or is that territory exclusively occupied by macho John Berenthal and practiced professional Laurence Fishburne? This is genuinely the entire moral dilemma of this film. At no point does it meaningfully reckon with whether someone should hunt and kill a bunch of criminals. It’s only concerned with whether Malek’s earnest CIA puzzlemaster can carry out the same sort of glorified vigilante violence as his broader colleagues. Even more unfortunately, it comes down with no notable answer and nothing much to say in general.

The Amateur comes from the mind of director James Hawes, an English talent best known for several well-received episodes of TV. His biggest accomplishment is probably the classic Doctor Who episode “The Empty Child,” one of the finest horror outings in the franchise. His only other feature film is One Life, a touching biography that bears truly no similarity to his latest project. The Amateur is an adaptation of a Robert Littell novel from 1981. It began life in 2003 with Hugh Jackman set to star, but after over 20 years of radio silence, it’s back in a new form.

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Rami Malek leads The Amateur as Charlie Heller, who loves his job cracking codes for the CIA almost as much as he loves his wife, Sarah. He stands out among his colleagues, but field agents, most notably a cardboard cutout of Jon Bernthal portraying a character only referred to as “The Bear,” won’t give him the time of day. His life is pleasant enough until Sarah becomes the unfortunate, coincidental victim of a terrorist attack. Heller is reasonably devastated, but the only thing on his mind is ensuring the death of those responsible. He takes his complaints up the chain, but the shady higher-ups simply won’t launch the immediate and violent response he’s demanding. Luckily, Heller has an encrypted friend on the other side of the world who hands him a tranche of documents implicating the CIA in some shady stuff. His leverage secured, Heller demands a crash course in spy stuff from Laurence Fishburne’s sardonic veteran and enough resources to do the dirty work himself. Everyone then takes turns telling him he can’t do it. No one mentions that he probably shouldn’t do it; they only care that he physically cannot carry out the vigilante justice he dreams of. This is the film’s only notable question: can a computer nerd with CIA training, several fake identities, and near-omnipotent knowledge of all the systems that govern modern life successfully hunt and kill around five criminals? The fact that CIA computer nerds actually do most of the killing these days never really comes up for some reason.

This film has a fairly dim-witted premise that it executes with very little nuance. It’s the spy movie equivalent of one of those “nerd beats jock at their own game” high school fantasy films. Consider the countless movies on the subject of a normal man taking up violence to save or avenge a fallen loved one. The genre is in no way hurting for additional entries, but most examples follow the so-called “everyman.” A guy who has a normal job, normal background, and normal circumstances loses someone important to him and sets everything aside to pursue vengeance. Every neophyte vigilante lives on a spectrum between Death Wish’s middle-aged architect and John Wick‘s unstoppable super-assassin. Charlie Heller occupies an awkward spot on that line. That awkward half-measure between Travis Bickle and Frank Castle places Heller a few steps removed from compelling characterization. It’s less “ordinary man becomes spy” and more “just a different kind of spy.” This, along with many other inconsistent elements, is a holdover from a very weird book that only partially made it to the screen.

Robert Littel’s The Amateur is both better and far worse than the film that bears its name. It’s an adaptation in the same sense as Kubrick’s Shining, in that the filmmakers took the premise and very little else. Movie Heller spends his downtime restoring an old prop plane and playing with a small toy puzzle, both of which appear very briefly. Book Heller dedicates his life to solving the Authorship Question and eventually conclusively proves that Francis Bacon actually wrote all of Shakespeare’s works. In the movie, Sarah is taken hostage because she nobly pushes someone else out of danger. In the book, Sarah dies because she’s Jewish and one of the killers is the son of a Nazi. It’s an altogether wilder experience, though a lot of those sharp edges actually add something somewhat compelling. Instead, the film has one or two striking images and basically nothing else to sell itself on. The film arguably drops the book’s most interesting gimmick, in which Heller avoids the movements of an assassin by being completely unaware of what spies would usually do and therefore very difficult to predict.

The Amateur is wholly bereft of anything particularly compelling or unique. There’s no real selling point for anyone who has seen a spy movie before. Rami Malek, Laurence Fishburne, and the rest of the cast turn in decent enough performances, but none of them elevate the material beyond its humble beginnings. Malek bears the majority of the film on his shoulders, and it’s hard to tell whether he played everything so low-energy on purpose or by Hawes’ direction. For a film about a guy who is so driven by grief he takes on the entire global security infrastructure and several armed killers, it’s all oddly sedate and uninvolved. No one ever took the time to ask what the audience was meant to be feeling at any given moment. It lacks the catharsis of a good revenge film, the intrigue of a good spy film, and the teeth of a good action film. A more ambitious movie might have found something worthwhile in its prolonged Hitman by way of a guy who speedruns Hitman on Twitch setpieces, but this one manages to make even that boring.

The Amateur is, in many ways, a movie about process that doesn’t really care about the details. Characters go through multi-stage plans that amount to very little, then stumble upon a working solution through pure luck. Everything is at a distance, but only because no one cares enough to come closer. It’s a film that simply didn’t bother to engage with any of the fascinating elements of its premise. The Amateur was always destined to live on TNT, with only the grim fate of cable and the prominence of streaming to keep it from its fate. It’ll be a perfect watch for bored older dudes in comfortable recliners. It’ll only be a dull time for those who dare to think about it. May a million snoring dads sing thee to thy rest, boring spy movie.

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