There’s a bit of well-placed timing early on in The Amateur, as Rami Malek’s screen credit comes into view just as his character, Charlie Heller, is wistfully driving on the way to his job with the CIA. Charlie, like many of Malek’s characters, is hyper-focused, clinical, and neurotic. Appearing in great contrast to the masculine Jon Berthal, who gruffly lumbers around the CIA stronghold as Charlie’s aloof friend Jackson. While the CIA may want to project an image of strength, Charlie’s role is behind the scenes, a cryptographer, the meek brains behind the brawn, an anti-social loner whose semblance of humanity seems to be tied mostly to his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan). Sarah is the only person he opens up to, and even that feels like pulling teeth as he deadpans her jokes and lets his work distract him from their conversations.
The Amateur itself is a subversive action/revenge thriller that turns the protagonist’s mind into the film’s biggest weapon. Yet, as we understand Charlie’s motivation and his sense of justice, he’s a flawed protagonist whose vengeance seems to teter over the line of selfishness. When news breaks that a terrorist attack has hit London, consuming and injuring a multitude of lives, including Charlie’s wife, he immediately springs into action to get to the bottom of the mysterious crime. However, he never really mentions or acknowledges that there were other lives affected, focusing his tunnel vision solely on Sarah. At one point, he even emphasizes that she “mattered” as if no one else did.
Nonetheless, Charlie, a civilian with no formal combat training, begs his agency to train him into a killer. It’s an endeavor that quickly proves ineffective, as Charlie lacks a comfortable killer instinct, but he uses the little training he was given to hunt down the men responsible for the attacks. Relying on his supreme technological skills to trap his foes into lethally compromising corners.
What works about the film’s execution is its serious, no-nonsense approach reminiscent of 90s and 2000s spy thrillers. Jason Bourne has been the common comparison made here, and The Amateur feels like the aggressive destination for the sharp corner turn that Bourne took the action genre on. Instead of the big burly brawlers of the Schwarzenegger/Stallone era, Matt Damon was stoic, potentially neurodivergent, while being reliant on his intellect and tech savvy in addition to combat skills and weapons usage. So it’s the action hero brought into a tech-driven world. But Rami Malek takes the unease of that archetype up to 11 or 12, yet the movie is seemingly apathetic to Charlie’s antisocial behavior and struggles to spread his compassion to more than just his immediate family.
The film is directed by James Hawes, who has certainly taken his cues from the likes of the Bourne films and Tom Clancy, invoking a hyper serious style that matches the psychology of the protagonist. Within that, however, the film’s scope and setpieces swing from unremarkable to exceptional, as you’d expect from a mid-budget action thriller. Laurence Fishburne has a big part here as a character vacillating between ally and foe to Charlie. Yet, while Fishburne probably has an underrated career catalog of action scenes, his big moment here starts off strong but fizzles out before it can really get going. Ironically, the best action in the movie involves the timid Charlie, one of which is a ludicrous fistfight that starts from a hypobaric chamber and ends in the street. But the film’s apex, both in terms of spectacle and perhaps in totality, occurs with a giant rooftop swimming pool as the centerpiece. In a display of carnage that feels like a fresh idea for a grand setpiece.
But as far as ideas, The Amateur has some things that hit and some that don’t quite measure up. In a short amount of time, Brosnahan is able to piece together a lovable spouse, one who understandably weighs on the psyche of the protagonist. An empathetic moment arrives when Charlie decides to sit in the grass outside, and then, from his view of his window, he’s able to picture a memory of Sarah. We don’t see how accurate the original moment was or from what angle he originally viewed her from, but it makes for a well-edited bit of nostalgia. A similar phenomenon inflicts Charlie when he enters a nightclub. However, this love story is accompanied by some interesting commentary about violence and masculine energy.
Throughout the story, Charlie is confronted by men who attempt to push him to his aggressive limit to prove if he can be a killer. The endgame of these tests leads to multiple occurrences where Charlie is egged on to fire a gun, but he fearfully refuses. While these moments are perhaps trying to communicate something moral about Charlie’s character, the problem is he does kill in this movie – it’s just not by way of a gun. Which raises a lot of questions about the film’s philosophy. Can you define yourself as “not a killer” so long as you refrain from guns? At that point, it seems like a game of semantics and contradiction. I think it would be more accurate to say Charlie doesn’t enjoy killing (that much becomes clear), but it’s more than a bit misleading to suggest he’s not capable of it outright. Near the climax of the movie, Charlie is challenged (by one of the people he’s tracked down to kill) to perform this same gun ritual, and it’s just… why? What does he care – why is this bad guy so invested in Rami Malek’s character arc? Just kill him before he kills you.
Much of this may have to do with the fact that the film is a remake and modernized adaptation of a novel from 1981. Thus, the familiar spy movie tropes that feel pulled out of the 90s, and the simplistic/incomplete mediation on masculine strength and violence, to put it generously. There’s also key changes that didn’t carry over from the novel, making The Amateur more influenced by its spy brethren on the silver screen. As far as the pantheon of flawed, troublesome vigilante parables, The Amateur is a middle of the pack chiller built off thrills and an easy to empathize romantic relationship, but lacking in propulsive suspense and well thought-out ideas. It’s a sleek, well-crafted movie that does the safe things right, but adventurous isn’t in its vocabulary.
Our Rating:
