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: 20th 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.