Charlie Heller (Rami Malek), the mad-as-hell secret-agent geek brainiac at the center of “The Amateur,” is a CIA analyst who works five floors underground at Langley, in the Decryption and Analysis department. There, he’s a master of all things coded and virtual, a surveillance hacker par excellence. Out of the office, he and his adoring business-person wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), reside in a renovated farmhouse and appear to have the perfect life. So when Sarah, on a corporate trip to London, gets taken hostage by a cadre of terrorists and is killed on the spot, it’s as if Charlie’s entire existence had been wiped away. Since the tragedy was an international incident, his bosses at the Agency assure him that the perpetrators will be hunted down. But that’s not enough for Charlie. It won’t sate his rage, his desire for vengeance. Instead, Charlie says, “I want to kill them himself.”
He’ll have to go rogue to do it. After all, what good would a revenge movie be if the revenge were sanctioned? That you’re breaking the law yourself is what gives it that special down-and-dirty flavor. I date the revenge film as we know it back to “Joe” (1970), in which Peter Boyle’s hardhat construction worker went on the warpath against a hippie commune, but of course the formative revenge films are “Walking Tall” (1973) and “Death Wish” (1974), which were all about men picking up a weapon (a handgun, a hickory club) and getting their payback on. The revenge film helped to lay the groundwork for the conservative revolution — before Fox News, its narrative of “No mercy” was echoed in 10,000 right-wing talk-radio broadcasts. The culmination of that legacy might well be the centrality of revenge to Donald Trump’s agenda. There are moments when he seems less the President than the Punisher.
Back in the day, part of the power of the revenge film was its subversive anti-social kick. Charles Bronson in “Death Wish” played a mild-mannered architect who, when his wife was killed, got in touch with his inner thug. In movies, that’s the “high” of revenge — it lets you feel righteous and beyond the law. But “The Amateur,” coming after many decades of these movies, has been made with a sleek tech look, a utilitarian proficiency, and a poker-faced preposterousness that allows the genre to feel as frictionless as a video game.
Charlie, in his CIA bunker, is not a violent man, and the hook of the movie is that even when he goes on his rampage, he’s detached from his violent impulses. He’s not much good at shooting a gun (he’s nearsighted), and he doesn’t become the kind of bare-knuckle brawler almost every action hero is. He’s not a man of action; he’s a man of planning. Even as he skips from Paris to Marseille to Istanbul to the Baltic Coast, chasing after the criminals who are some sort of freelance weapons brokers for bad nation states, he is still, in a certain sense, behind that desk, hacking and manipulating, executing his hand-made traps, though what this mostly makes you feel is that he’s seen a lot of movies.
Maybe that’s why “The Amateur” doesn’t pack all that much of a punch. It’s directed, with anonymous efficiency, by James Hawes, a British television director who’s helmed episodes of “Doctor Who,” and the script, by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli (based on a novel by Robert Littell), keeps throwing things at us. But there’s a difference between springing twists and earning them. It can seem churlish to complain that an undercover thriller is mission: implausible, but much of what happens in “The Amateur” seems…arbitrary. Charlie shows up at an exotic locale, tracks down one of the killers in question and confronts him, trying to get him to give up the location of the group’s leader, and when he refuses you’d better believe that the suspended glass swimming pool the killer is taking a midnight dip in has been rigged with explosives. At times, “The Amateur” could have been called the “The Detonator.”
Charlie initially tries to blackmail his CIA overseers, after stumbling onto an Agency coverup of a coordinated drone attack in which 1,000 civilians were killed. But it’s not a good idea to blackmail the CIA. To buy time, the Agency’s sinister deputy director, Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), plays along with Charlie’s little vengeance plot, even giving him special “training” under the tutelage of agency veteran Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), who sizes up Charlie by saying, “You’re not a killer.” The training zips by so quickly it’s almost a joke; the whole point is that for Charlie, learning to navigate these action clichés doesn’t totally take.
But once he gives the slip to Moore, who keeps dispatching overseers to catch him, “The Amateur” turns into a “Bourne” film, minus the clobbering fights and clattering car chases, crossed with “Death Wish” crossed with “Munich” crossed with “The Killer” crossed with a generic spy adventure for an age when technology is murder. The movie isn’t badly made (it’s never less than watchable), but a lot of pulp has been stuffed into its blender.
There’s a funny moment when Charlie picks an apartment lock with the aid of an instructional video on how to do so. The scene points to a very different sort of movie “The Amateur” could have been, had it truly lived up to its title. But the scene feels like some stray remnant from an earlier draft; that learn-as-you-go quality isn’t there nearly enough. Charlie ultimately forms an alliance with the spy he’s been corresponding with for five years under the code name Inquiline, who turns out to be…a bit too much of a pussycat.
This is the third thriller that Rami Malek has made since becoming a star in “Bohemian Rhapsody,” and it nudges his tense, twitchy moodiness even closer to the center of his brand. He’s the right actor to play a digital geek turned mindhunter; those eyes of his glare like lasers. His best moment comes early on, when he entraps one of the killers (an asthmatic) in a plastic medical chamber and dumps pollen into it. For a moment, you can taste the sadism. Mostly, though, Malek plays out his methodical mission of vengeance as if it were something almost theoretical. The conceit of “The Amateur” — that Charlie must do all this himself — remains, at heart, a conceit. That’s why the movie is okay but never, you know, killer.
From Variety US