The Amateur Review: In Praise of Middle-Tier Genre Fare
Ken Jones, OnScreen Blog Chief Film Critic
I love a good spy thriller; they’re movie catnip for me. The Amateur is a movie that is right up my alley, taking an unlikely person and putting them in the middle of a globetrotting story of espionage and revenge. Not to set up unreasonable expectations, but Hitchcock made more than a few films like this, and it definitely feels like there are a few ‘90s movies that could share some DNA with The Amateur. The film is an adaptation of a book by spy novelist Robert Littell, and was previously adapted in 1981.
Oscar-winner Rami Malek is the protagonist of the story, Charlie Heller, a CIA analyst whose life is turned upside down when his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) is killed during a terrorist attack while on a business trip in London. Charlie channels his grief into his work, seeking to figure out who the people are who are responsible for his wife’s death. He is met with resistance when he takes this information to his superiors (Holy McCallany and Danny Sapani).
Not getting satisfactory answers from them, he takes advantage of his skills to essentially blackmail his superiors to train him to be a field agent and go after Sarah’s killers. Trained by Hendo (Laurence Fishburne), it soon becomes clear that Charlie is not cut out for field work and doing what is necessary with a gun. Nevertheless, he is determined for revenge and justice, so he goes rogue and seeks alternative methods to get the desired results.
It is an interesting conceit for a movie, how someone who is not able to pull the trigger when it matters has to resort to unconventional means to exact revenge for his wife’s murder. While Charlie is not proficient in wielding a weapon, his ingenuity and computer skills make him overqualified in finding alternative measures than a bullet.
The movie is only nominally interested in the ethics of vigilante killing and whether pulling the trigger or manipulating circumstances for people to meet their own demise is a distinction without a difference. There may be a level of remove, and Charlie may not get his hands dirty, but he is still taking a life. His first attempt goes horribly wrong, proving his amateur-ness. But his planning gets more proficient as he climbs the ladder toward his ultimate goal, an elusive man named Schiller (Michael Stuhlbarg).
Malek gives a solid performance as Charlie, a grieving widower who lives with a lot of regrets and is haunted by his wife’s memory while he is on his journey of revenge. It’s possible that Charlie is somewhere on the autism spectrum; if he is, it is only implied and never stated outright. It’s also possible that Malek is an actor who just comes across that way. And while there is some technological overlap, this is not just a variation on his performance as Elliot in the TV series Mr. Robot.
The film does a believable job of making Charlie a character who might not have the prerequisite skills to be a field agent but has a big enough brain to stay mostly one step ahead of the people on his tail and to think on the fly when things don’t go according to plan.
Brosnahan is a name that is about to be much bigger with the arrival of James Gunn’s Superman this summer; already, she feels overqualified for a role mainly involving her as a figment of Charlie’s imagination for most of the movie. McCallany feels appropriately cast as the shady CIA Deputy Director, Charlie’s major impediment to achieving his goals. Caitríona Balfe and Julianne Nicholson have strong supporting roles.
Hendo's mentor (Fishburne) is probably the most entertaining of the supporting roles. He starts out as the mentor and then quickly turns into someone who is pursuing Charlie. Oddly enough, Jon Bernthal shows up in two scenes as a field agent nicknamed The Bear; he probably could’ve done his two scenes in one day, but nevertheless, it is a fun extended cameo.
While there is some uniqueness to a character like Charlie being an unconventional protagonist for a spy thriller, the wheel is not being reinvented here. Many of the plot's beats will be familiar to anyone with more of a passing familiarity with the spy genre; a rogue agent on the run, trying to right wrongs while evading authorities, is nothing new. But while there are definitely some spy thrillers that have done it better and are very satisfying views, there are scores of others that have done it far, far worse.
Anyone who is a fan of the spy genre can get some enjoyment out of the mousetrap that The Amateur puts Rami Malek’s Charlie through. It will definitely scratch an itch in that regard. It is a proficient, unspectacular spy movie; it is unlikely to be anyone’s favorite spy thriller of all time, but it’s also unlikely to be anyone’s worst. And I don’t say that to damn it with faint praise. Personally, I would welcome twenty more movies like The Amateur, which was made for $60 million, over some of the higher budget disappointments or the warmed-over, lazy sequels.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars