About half an hour into The Amateur, Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is lurking inside a Parisian apartment building where a terrorist (Barbara Probst) lives. There is no doubt of her guilt, he has a gun pointed at her back, and she is completely oblivious to his presence in the dark hallway. Yet he freezes up, unable to pull the trigger, and she enters her apartment without incident.
Already this is more interesting than most Hollywood action-thrillers, which would have Jason Statham or The Rock shoot her and then get on with their business. They’re still making movies where the action hero has a definite limitation. Indeed, Malek played such a man in his four seasons of Mr. Robot, where his superhacker dealt with clinical depression and social anxiety. His presence in the lead role of The Amateur is pretty much the only distinctive thing in this spy thriller.
Charlie is a CIA intelligence analyst specializing in decryption, and one day at work the new CIA director (Julianne Nicholson) calls him into her office and informs him that his beloved wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) has been murdered in a terrorist attack in London, where she was traveling on business.
Analyzing the footage of masked gunmen shooting Sarah in the head outside her hotel gives Charlie the killers’ names, professions, and current locations. When his bosses (Holt McCallany and Danny Sapani) don’t act on the information, he blackmails them into giving him training, money, and fake identities so that he can kill the killers himself. This amounts to treason, but by the time they send agents after him, he’s already halfway to London to pick up the trail.
The movie is based on Robert Littell’s novel, which I haven’t had a chance to read and which was made into a previous movie in 1981 that starred John Savage. Director James Hawes has helmed six episodes of the British TV show Slow Horses, so he’s familiar with spycraft as well as spies who suck at their jobs. Charlie is highly intelligent and highly motivated, but the filmmakers know that it takes more than that to make a viable agent. While he has natural talent at putting bombs together, a scene at a firing range shows that he is a truly terrible shot.
When he finally confronts the aforementioned woman at her allergy clinic, she attacks him and easily gets the better of him in the fight. She is accidentally killed while escaping from him, and he takes her phone. This might be useful to someone with his tech savvy, but Charlie’s CIA instructor (Laurence Fishburne) points out that it also gives his precise location to the agents who are out to kill him. It’s a lot easier for us ordinary folks at the multiplex to relate to some desk jockey like Charlie than to some Special Forces operative who kills efficiently and dispassionately.
It is amusing when Charlie throws off his pursuers by hacking into security camera feeds and putting his own face on random dudes in European capitals. I still wish there were more creativity in the way he eludes his own agents. (I mean, Charlie moves freely about the allergy clinic by putting on a white coat. That’s just lazy.) The movie sets itself in various backwaters in Eastern Europe, but it doesn’t do enough to differentiate the locations. An empty warehouse is just an empty warehouse, even if we’re told that it’s in Constanta, Romania.
The character moments between the action sequences come out better, as Charlie’s Russian contact in Istanbul (Caitríona Balfe) describes almost going crazy after her husband was killed, and the terrorist mastermind (Michael Stuhlbarg, cast against type to moderate effectiveness) observes how Charlie keeps giving his victims a chance to save themselves as a way of absolving himself of the murders. Malek’s frigid line readings work to make him believable as a man who’s out of touch with his emotions — when informed of Sarah’s death, his first reaction is to suggest calling her hotel room. What would be a generic and forgettable spy thriller gains a heart because of his presence.
The Amateur
Starring Rami Malek and Laurence Fishburne. Directed by James Hawes. Written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, based on Robert Littell’s novel. Rated PG-13.
