In a world where doling out blame can be just as cursory as seeking revenge for the things we’ve lost, perhaps James Hawes’ The Amateur is a double-edged cautionary sword. To the latter point, it’s an action thriller in which a meek man hatches elaborate, high IQ-dependent schemes that will deliver extreme consequences to the savage men who thoughtlessly murdered his wife during a hostage situation in London, regardless of the fact that eliminating them won’t bring her back. The former notion – blaming people for things we similarly cannot change – relates just as much to the film’s plot as it does our collective tendency to search a movie high and low for twists that simply aren’t there. To be fair, The Amateur is not a film without twists, per se, but a film that rejects the cheap “revelations” that so many other mystery-laden pictures tend to bank on providing an audience in hopes that gasps will drown out the more common (but more silent) eyerolls being exhibited throughout the theater. In other words, this is not a work of spy-adjacent fare that will suddenly drop the bombs that Character X was in on it the whole time and Character Y was never really dead.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to forgive that straightforwardness because of how well-executed and decently entertaining the movie is. It’s a credit to director James Hawes, screenwriters Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, and even Robert Littell’s 1981 novel (from which The Amateur was adapted) that they hold true to less preposterous filmmaking standards while still managing to make a preposterous movie in which a CIA decoder teaches himself how to kill with his mind. But that’s what Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) feels he has to resort to after Langley’s top brass refuses to provide him with the resources he requests to hunt the men responsible for the aforementioned death of his wife (Rachel Brosnahan, taking a paycheck job for approximately nine minutes of screentime). Even after the CIA’s Deputy Director (Holt McCallany) and other bigwigs send him off to become a safe-ish gun wielder with skills only “Hendo” (Laurence Fishburne) can teach, the skills Charlie has actually mastered help him suss out the fact that he’s being set up. Cue a game of cat and mouse in which the mouse is the one pawing at the many felines desperate to wrangle him in their teeth before things get out of hand.
We may not be as smart as Charlie – a CIA supervisor (Danny Sapani) notes that this guy may be a desk jockey, but he has an IQ of 170 – but we’re reading the same pages of the same book. Therefore, we know that there’s something cagey about his bosses (Julianne Nicholson has a minor role as the CIA’s director), and not just that they’re suspiciously desperate to keep him at a pinky finger’s length during their investigation of the attack that killed Charlie’s beloved Sarah. We’re at least partially certain that the mysterious Russian informant (Caitríona Balfe, trying to mask the Irish) he’s been messaging for years as part of a different covert case can be trusted. It’s almost painfully obvious that the bevy of breadcrumbs Charlie is leaving for his employer to sweep up are leading to the wrong loaf. It’s almost brilliant how painless The Amateur is as an exercise in comprehension, given that most movies of a similar mold would presume its audience was stupid, thus spelling out its inevitable surprises without outright revealing them just long enough to make us feel smart should we catch them before they come to light.
Perhaps this serves both as a warning about The Amateur and a criticism against it, even if the film’s intentional, over-calculated lack of shocks isn’t entirely something it should be faulted for. In a just world, or a world in which action thrillers about CIA operatives (even amateur ones) could be accepted on their most basic narrative terms, a basic thriller knowing exactly what it is and what it’s doing would be celebrated as a fresh entrant in a well-trod realm of genre filmmaking. After all, this is a movie that showed its two biggest setpieces in its trailers: The first sees Charlie taking out the second of his wife’s four killers by decompressing the glass floor of a pool floating between two skyscrapers, and the second involves homemade IEDs attached to a container of missiles.
But it’s one thing to show us the blueprint for Charlie’s strategies; having him explain how these men could theoretically escape their unsuspected traps in painstaking, if bluntly-delivered detail is another thing entirely. “Get out of the pool or swim really fast,” he tells the first. “If you jump really fast, you might survive the blast,” he warns his next victim. These… are the same messages, and they aren’t the only times in the course of an overlong movie that Charlie delivers them. In a two-hour film made up almost entirely of planning and executing, to spend so much in-between time talking about said plans and executions would give anyone a headache, even if the migraine isn’t brought on by trying to solve any puzzles.
This might be less of a problem with The Amateur than it is a problem with the titular character itself, but can just one of those things be true in a case such as this? In fact, the film’s most impossible puzzle could feasibly be reduced to the presence of Malek. Last seen crippling Lewis Strauss’ chance at winning a position in President Eisenhower’s Cabinet in Oppenheimer, it’s worth considering that Malek has maintained his career in Hollywood based partially on talent, but more so on the fact that it’s still impossible to figure out where he fits. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s an Oscar winner – somehow, the most ridiculous thing in a ridiculous film is the fact that the underused Fishburne is the Academy Award nominee in its ensemble – that keeps him on call sheets, filmmakers and studios desperate to find a role that works as well for Malek as Mr. Robot did once upon a time, but there’s a hyper-specificity to his inexplicable stardom that even renders the parts that should work bewildering. That Malek himself could feasibly hack into the globe’s CCTV system is about as realistic as his character’s talent for making cappuccinos and the alarm he expresses at his wife mentioning that she’ll be on a work trip for five days, not the four he thought. The mental math reveals the same answer as a calculator, yet we’re still baffled by the outcome.
If The Amateur were marketable beyond its basic premise – i.e., if its titular makeshift Machiavellian assassin were played by anyone other than the posterboy for movie stars no Hollywood mastermind has any idea what to do with – it might not have been long after opening weekend before a Charlie Heller avatar showed up as a purchasable avatar in Fortnite’s shop. That’s the kind of character this is (Jason Bourne who moonlights as a Geek Squad staffer), and the kind of movie he inhabits, a competent thriller that is more in line with its trappings than its star will ever let it be. It’s not fair to blame Malek for the fact that the folks at companies like 20th Century Studios want him to lead their movie. It just makes no damn sense. (Compels me, though.) Thankfully, The Amateur is easy to forgive for the things about it that are less logical. Movies like it don’t require logic. Whether that’s for better or for worse is a conundrum for individual viewers to deal with on their own.
The Amateur is currently playing exclusively in theaters courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
Will Bjarnar is a writer, critic, and video editor based in New York City. Originally from Upstate New York, and thus a member of the Greater Western New York Film Critics Association and a long-suffering Buffalo Bills fan, Will first became interested in movies when he discovered IMDb at a young age; with its help, he became a voracious list maker, poster lover, and trailer consumer. He has since turned that passion into a professional pursuit, writing for the film and entertainment sites Next Best Picture, InSession Film, Big Picture Big Sound, Film Inquiry, and, of course, Geek Vibes Nation. He spends the later months of each year editing an annual video countdown of the year’s 25 best films. You can find more of his musings on Letterboxd (willbjarnar) and on X (@bywillbjarnar).
