The Amateur (now streaming on Hulu) ranks as one of 2024’s sleeper hits, a Rami Malek-starring action-drama that grossed a respectable $95 million worldwide, out-earning tried-and-true stuff like a Jason Statham vehicle (A Working Man) and a Gerard Butler sequel (Den of Thieves: Pantera). Go figure? Yeah, kinda, considering Malek hasn’t had a role this meaty since he won the Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody. The film updates the 1981 movie of the same title, based on a novel by Robert Littell, and by “updates” I mean “recasts the protagonist as a Computer Guy,” and by “recasts the protagonist as a Computer Guy,” I mean “makes us remember Malek was in Mr. Robot.” So does the movie successfully reshape Malek as an action star? Not really, and that ultimately works in The Amateur’s favor thematically – although the jury’s out whether he has enough screen presence to elevate a down-to-its-bones programmer like this to something greater than the sum of its parts.
THE AMATEUR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Is Charlie Heller (Malek) building a bomb out in the barn? Psyche! It’s just engine parts for the fixer-upper single prop his wife surprised him with recently. You know, like, happy birthday, I bought you an airplane!, just like anybody’s wife would do. The plane is symbolic of things, of course, but that’s ultimately not as important to the plot than the notion that the guy is mechanically inclined enough to build IEDs, should he ever need them, hint hint nudge wink nudge. The guy’s really totally in luff-lurve-love with Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan, the new superstar Lois Lane in Superman), who jets off to London for work while Charlie stays behind and drives his nondescript car to a parking lot full of other nondescript vehicles, with nary a red one in sight, possibly because CIA employees don’t want to draw attention to themselves. He takes the elevator down to the negative-fifth floor – neat! – where he works in the Decryption and Analysis dept., where he tippity-tappity type-type-types in front of an array of monitors so he may, one can logically presume, decrypt and analyze things.
One Fateful Day, Charlie e-chats with one of his anonymous informants, who sends him some files that are more sensitive than a poison ivy rash. Which is to say, they implicate his boss, Chief Moore (Holt McCallany), who’s been enabling some unauthorized black-ops shenanigans – these guys and their OPS, I’m tellin’ ya, all the time with the OPS OPS OPS. Of course, this means trouble for Charlie, who’s pulled into the Chief’s office the next day and told that Sarah was killed in a London terrorist attack, thus condemning the new superstar Lois Lane to a smattering of the world’s saddest hallucinations and flashbacks. At this point, we’re left to wonder if the OPS and the terrorist attack have anything to do with each other – hmm, I say, hmm – and if so, whether the screenplay is executed with enough clarity to confirm our suspicions.
At first, Charlie does what anyone would do – tortures himself by watching videos of the terrorist attack on social media. Then he digs up the identities of the four peesesacrap who killed Sarah and presents them to Chief Moore so he can do something about this. Now, Moore’s response should be a firm assertion that this is a conflict of interest and that Charlie needs to go on bereavement leave, but Moore’s a total butt who tells Charlie that this case isn’t a priority, then adds insult to injury be essentially saying, hey go back to your computer, flimsy nerd boy. And this is when Charlie blackmails his boss to train him to be a rootin’-tootin’ killin’-ass field agent so he can go after his wife’s murderers, lest he blow the whistle. So Moore sends Charlie to a wily veteran agent, “Hendo” Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), who tries to teach our guy to shoot a gun and fight like a man. I’m not sure it fully takes, especially because the movie pushes real hard on the idea that it takes a lot of horrible stuff in one’s guts and brains to have the will to kill a person. However, as soon as Charlie learns to build IEDs and gets phony passports and false identities, he slips out of Hendo’s grip and jets overseas to hunt down those scumfarts himself. Finding them isn’t hard when you’re a tippity-tappity type-type-typing instahacker like Charlie. But does he truly have the horrible stuff in his guts and brains to finish the job?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: You might say Charlie is like Snowden if he wanted to be Bourne again.
Performance Worth Watching: The Amateur boasts a doozy of an overqualified cast in supporting-slash-paycheck roles: Brosnahan, Fishburne, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Julianne Nicholson. But only Fishburne gets much of an opportunity to flex some thespian muscles.
Memorable Dialogue: Charlie shares his predicament with a coworker:
Charlie: I may have looked at something I shouldn’t have.
Coworker Carlos (Adrian Martinez): Within our department?
Charlie: Gray area.
Coworker Carlos: We don’t do gray areas, Charlie. Our work is decidedly binary.
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Welp. The screenplay is not executed with enough clarity to confirm our suspicions. It sort of maybe does, but it vagues its way through enough plot details that all the handwaving could be weighed by the metric ton. (A safe answer for how Charlie accomplishes a lot of stuff? Computer Shit, of course.) Gotta keep that run time manageable, The Amateur clocking in a few ticks past the two-hour mark, and making a case for being better-suited to a miniseries format.
Nevertheless, this is a perfectly serviceable middle-of-the-road dad movie that works through a series of familiar set pieces with almost remarkable adequacy: A John Wick nightclub sequence, scads of Bourne-style location hopping – London to Paris to Marseilles to Istanbul to Madrid to Constanta (that’s in Romania) to Primorsk (that’s in Russia) – some Mission: Impossible triple-layer cat/mouse/mouse or cat/cat/mouse games, bits of Tom Clancy conspiratorial stuff. It mostly earns its emotional arc thanks to a thoughtful scene between Charlie and a key informant who also lost her spouse, played by Caitriona Balfe); otherwise Malek is a bit stiff and mawkish as he tries to find the right notes within the text of a so-so screenplay.
The film compensates for a goodly portion of its flaws with a unique hook: Charlie’s an average guy who’s bad at shooting and fighting, so he finds other, more creative means to off his antagonists, some of them patently absurd, but hey, do we really need more headshots or people falling from very hight places? In one amusing scene, he fires up a YouTube lockpicking video while he’s in the field, trying to access the apartment of one of the killers, thus justifying the title of the movie. It’s refreshing for a film of this genre to find a different means to present the moral conundrum of spy games, and not climax with the usual cavalcade of explosions and a triple-digit body count. The Amateur may have earned itself a sequel thanks to its conceptual novelty and medium-popularity, and that may not be entirely unwelcome, as long as its very, very smart protag never learns how to point a gun or throw a punch.
Our Call: The Amateur is a bit underwhelming at times, but it’s worth a look for its variations on a familiar genre. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
