Producers: Hutch Parker, Dan Wilson, Rami Malek and Joel B. Michaels  Director: James Hawes   Screenplay: Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli  Cast: Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Laurence Fishburne, Holt McCallany, Caitríona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Julianne Nicholson, Danny Sapani, Adrian Martinez, Barbara Probst, Marc Rismann, Joseph Millson, Henry Garrett and Alice Hewkin   Distributor: 20^th Century Studios

Grade: C

So long as plausibility is of little concern, you could have a reasonably good time at “The Amateur.”  But if familiarity is a problem, you’ll find the espionage thriller pretty much a redundancy.

Technically this is a remake: Robert Littell’s 1981 novel was adapted in the year of its publication by Charles Jarrott, starring John Savage in the lead.  It didn’t make such of an impression.  (Director James Hawes does tip his hat to it, though, by casting Marthe Keller, one of its stars, in a cameo as a florist.) The new screenplay by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli is updated and embellished with lots of techno-babble and flashy computer hardware—the original Cold War setting is like ancient history, after all—but in the end the plot is still the hoary old one about the guy who seeks revenge against the villains who have killed his wife or girlfriend.  It’s a tale that’s been told repeatedly on screen—remember Gregory Peck’s 1958 Western “The Bravados,” among many others?—and Michael Cuesta’s “American Assassin” (2017) featured Dylan O’Brien in a narrative that foreshadowed the beats of this one in many respects.

Here it’s Rami Malek who’s seeking justice as Charles Heller, a nerdy, diffident fellow who works as a cryptographer in the bowels of a huge CIA complex under veteran Deputy Director Alexander Moore (Holt McCallany).  Somehow he’s gotten married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), an ebullient businesswoman who has even bought him the wreck of a vintage plane for him to rebuild in the garage of their secluded farmhouse.  She tries to get him to join her when she’s off to London for a conference, but he declines, apparently disliking travel. 

Back at work, he’s enlisted by gregarious “real” agent Jackson O’Brien, aka “The Bear” (Jon Bernthal) to help him out with some computer stuff.  But more importantly, he’s called by Moore into the office of the recently-appointed Director Samantha O’Brien (Julianne Nicholson), who informs him that Sarah has been killed after being taken as a hostage during a terrorist assault at her hotel.  (What the terrorists were after there is never discussed.)  O’Brien and Moore assure him that the agency will pursue the perpetrators relentlessly. 

But they don’t.  Heller takes matters into his own hands, using his computer savvy to identify the four villains.  But Moore and his lieutenant Caleb Horowitz (Danny Sapani) offer lame excuses for not taking action against them.  Smelling a rat, Charlie once again goes to his bank of computers to uncover encrypted data from disaffected whistle-blower Inquiline Davies (Caitríona Balfe) that reveals that the two men were implicated in an unauthorized drone tragedy in Turkey, and blackmails them into letting him go into the field to take care of the perpetrators himself.  They reluctantly agree, sending him to a military base where veteran Col. Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) is to train him in the dark arts of espionage.  Though Henderson conclude that the task is hopeless because Charlie doesn’t possess the killer instinct, Heller goes off on his own with his computer savvy—and some equipment purloined from the training facility—to do the job.

From this point “The Amateur” turns into a globe-hopping tale as Charlie systematically tracks down each of the four perpetrators, starting in London and proceeding to Paris, Marseille, Istanbul, Romania and the Russian coast.  The caption-maker goes a step further than usual by not only telling us the nation (e.g. “Paris, France,” as if we might think it was Paris, Texas) but by giving us the longitude-and-latitude coordinates, although the usefulness of the information is unclear.)  The use of actual European locations would be more impressive if Martin Ruhe’s cinematography weren’t so often dark and color-desaturated, rendering many images murky.

In any event, despite being labeled as lacking the killer instinct—true, it turns out, only in being reluctant to shoot someone close-up, though bombs are perfectly fine—and being pursued by CIA agents, including Henderson and Horowitz (the latter shows up late, to no effect whatever), Charlie gets help from Inquiline though it puts her in real peril when his CIA enemies call in help from their Russian comrades. 

Still, Charlie does in fact manage to dispose of his first three targets, the first very clumsily.  Unable simply to shoot Gretchen Frank (Barbara Probst), he instead tries to extract information from the allergy-prone woman by injecting flower pollen into a breathing chamber where she’s being tested.  He releases her at the last moment, though, and she’s run down in the street before he can fire his gun.  An attempt to secure the location of ringleader Sean Schiller (Michael Stuhlbarg) from a second confederate (Marc Rismann) is even more baroque: Charlie rigs a swimming pool atop a skyscraper where the guy’s doing laps to explode and sets the bomb off when his quarry tries to escape.  (It’s certainly the most impressive episode in Maria Djurkovic’s otherwise prosaic production design and Jan Maroske’s VFX work.)  The third man (Joseph Millson) he deals with, also with a bomb, in a more conventional, even dismissive fashion even after the guy reveals Schiller’s whereabouts.

There follows the inevitable showdown with the sadly underused Stuhlbarg, which devolves into yet another discussion about how Charlie, despite what he’s done, really doesn’t possess the killer instinct.  So rather than get the typical explosive finale, we’re treated to an intellectualized twist that many will find deflating in terms of their expectations: not a satisfying bang but a self-satisfied whimper.

That’s par for the course in a spy thriller than proves to be, despite the occasional burst of energy, a pretty sluggish enterprise as directed by Hawes and edited by Jonathan Amos.  The approach is, however, of a piece with Malek’s understated hero, to whom he brings his usual brand of twitchy eccentricity.  Of the others Fishburne contributes his customary flip gravity and Balfe makes an appealing confederate.  But McCallany and Sapani are stock corrupt bigwigs, and Nicholson is wasted as the superior intent on cleaning up their mess.  As for Brosnahan, she’s appealing as the loving wife in the early going, and plays the terrified but courageous hostage well, but in the later reels is forced into the thankless role of a ghost who haunts her husband’s memory. 

In sum “The Amateur” is interesting for putting a new spin on a formulaic revenge plot, but in the process it de-energizes the formula.  

Producers: Piers Tempest, Marie-Christine Jaeger-Firmenich and Nick Hamm   Director: Nick Hamm Screenplay: Nick Hamm   Cast: Claes Bang, Connor Swindells, Golshifteh Farahani, Jonah Hauer-King, Ellie Bamber, Rafe Spall, Amar Chadha-Patel, Sam Keeley, Jake Dunn, Tobias Jowett, Solly McLeod, Emily Beecham, Éanna Hardwicke, Jess Douglas-Welsh, David Moorst, Neva Leoni, Theo Hamm, Colin Bennett, Billy Postlethwaite, Diarmaid Murtagh, Jonathan Pryce and Ben Kingsley   Distributor: Samuel Goldwyn Films

Grade: C

Nick Hamm’s adventure movie about the legendary medieval Swiss hero starts off with the obvious hook: Tell (Claes Bang) raises his bow and aims an arrow at the apple propped on his son’s head a good distance away.  But it won’t be for another hour, halfway into “William Tell,” that we’ll see the actual shot.  Could anyone have thought this would generate suspense?

In the meantime Hamm gives us a revved-up version of the 1804 play by the influential German philosopher and author Friedrich Schiller, perhaps best remembered today for penning the poem that Beethoven set as the “Ode to Joy” in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony.  Hamm makes changes, of course—often in the interest of contemporary resonance—and adds a coda that will invite a sequel if box office receipts warrant one.  He also offers large-scale battle sequences that could never have been attempted on the nineteenth-century stage but are obligatory in this sort of twenty-first century fare.

In fundamental terms, though, the film is surprisingly true to its source: it’s a tale of the struggle for liberty against tyranny, a theme that’s as topical today as it was then, intended to rouse us to righteous anger against the oppressor and idolize the rebellious hero.  Unfortunately, in this rather Hamm-fisted form, Tell’s legend comes across as rather a slog.

Mixing historical background with legend, the story is set in motion in 1307, when the Austrian king Albert I of Habsburg (Ben Kingsley), aka “the One-Eyed,” is extracting taxes from the disunited Swiss cantons.  In the folk tradition, he exercises control through a ruthless bailiff, Albrecht Gessler (Connor Swindells).  Tell, a farmer reluctant to get involved in the resistance movement as a result of the horrors he witnessed as a crusader, has nonetheless assisted a man being pursued by the king’s soldiers at the insistence of his wife Suna (Golshifteh Farahani) and son Walter (Tobias Jowett), and though still resistant to the idea of becoming a leader of the opposition, falls afoul of Gessler by neglecting to pay proper respect to Albert’s authority.  It’s Gessler who orders the renowned bowman to shoot the apple off Walter’s head as a public punishment and then jails him; the arrest prompts the squabbling canton leaders to coalesce in open rebellion.

Tell’s emergence as a rebel icon is contrasted with the decision of Rudenz (Jonah Hauer-King), heir-apparent to the esteemed Swiss House of Attinghausen headed by his aged uncle (Jonathan Pryce), to give his loyalty to Albert, not merely out of political calculation but because of his love for Berta (Ellie Bamber), Albert’s niece, whose hand he hopes to win—though Gessler is also interested in her.  After seeing Gessler’s cruelty, Rudenz goes over to the rebels, and feisty Berta supports them as well.  In fact, she frees Tell, who now joins the rebel movement and becomes one of its leaders.

There follow serious reverses, like an assault on a fortress held by Gessler that’s betrayed and fails with severe losses.  But Tell rallies his followers to undertake another assault, which succeeds.  Gessler responds by seizing Walter and threatening to kill him, intending to hold the boy until relief forces arrive, but they turn back after learning that Berta has killed Albert. Walter succeeds in freeing himself from Gessler’s grasp but urges Tell to allow the fuming Gessler to live rather than sink to his level.  Victory seems to be won, but Berta reports that Albert’s daughter Agnes (Jess Douglas-Welsh) has sworn to take vengeance on the Swiss for her father’s death.  Another war looms as the film ends.

It’s not hard to discern similarities between the Tell legend and that of Robin Hood, but the contrast between Hamm’s dour effort and Michael Curtiz’s classic 1938 take on the latter couldn’t be more striking, the one grimly serious and the other jaunty fun.  While Bang has all the charisma of Jason Statham on a bad day, Errol Flynn lights up the screen with derring-do; though Swindells sneers mightily, he can’t match the peerless villainy of Basil Rathbone; and while Kingsley merely snarls and growls, the incomparable Claude Rains turns Prince John into a deliciously slippery baddie.  Even Beecham’s spunk—her role increased, obviously to enhance her feminist credentials, by making her the assassin of Albert, a task assigned by Schiller to Duke John (here reduced to inconsequentiality as played by Theo Hamm)—pales beside the luminosity of Olivia de Havilland’s Maid Marian. 

Of course there are no Merry Men here—merriment has been banished in Hamm’s gloomy world, and all the Swiss rebels are a somber lot, the prevailing mood accentuated by Jamie D. Ramsay’s gray, muddy cinematography, a production design by Tonino Zera that emphasizes mud and muck, editing by Yan Miles that’s staid except when it becomes energetically chaotic in the fight sequences, and a score by Steven Price that’s as instantly forgettable as Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s for Curtiz was memorable.

But in a nod to diversity, Tell’s wife Suna is a woman he met during his unhappy service as a crusader in the Holy Land, and Walter is thus of mixed blood.  This fact allows Gessler to characterize the boy as a “mongrel,” making him even more hissable.  But like the feminist-inspired expansion of Berta’s part in the rebellion (to the loss of Rudenz, who in Hauer-King’s performance emerges as a handsome dullard) the choice just feels like a cheap contrivance designed to draw attention to modern forms of oppression.

Recent French versions of old Dumas potboilers—“The Three Musketeers” and “The Count of Monte Cristo”—have proven that these warhorses can be dusted off and made to live again for modern audiences.  By contrast Nick Hamm’s “William Tell” bungles a classic legend.  Listen to Rossini’s overture instead.