The Amateur, 2025.
Directed by James Hawes.
Starring Rami Malek, Michael Stuhlbarg, Laurence Fishburne, Rachel Brosnahan, Jon Bernthal, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson, Evan Milton, Caitríona Balfe, Nick Mills, Tiffany Gray, Adrian Martinez, Kate Sumpter, David Mills, Anita Anand, Ryan Chilcote, Barbara Probst, Joseph Millson, Marc Rissmann, and Danny Sapani.
SYNOPSIS:
When his supervisors at the CIA refuse to take action after his wife is killed in a London terrorist attack, a decoder takes matters into his own hands.
In The Amateur, Rami Malek’s Charlie Heller likes puzzles, happily employed in the decryption department of the CIA. As such, he spends most of every day staring into screens, cracking code while getting intel from an anonymous computer hacker codenamed Inquiline. Mostly a shut-in, it’s a drastically different lifestyle from his wife Sarah (Rachel Bresnahan), who has a job that consistently keeps her traveling around the world. They are so different, one wonders how they became romantically entangled in the first place. Nevertheless, Charlie promises that one day, he will journey with Sarah.
Charlie is also the type of person who can become so buried in his work that he loses sight of his idyllic life. While Sarah is off in London attending a conference, Charlie discovers horrific unauthorized operations headed by Director Moore (Holt McCallany) unbeknownst to his superior, Director O’Brien (Julianne Nicholson). He is in deep over his head and so compelled to keep digging around that he doesn’t make time to have a lengthy conversation with Sarah when she calls. Charlie backs off only when some of his co-workers tell him to leave it alone after making vague references about what he has found. He heads home, tries to call his wife, and then goes to sleep.
The next day, Charlie’s world is turned upside down, as it is brought to his attention that there was a terrorist attack during the London conference that left Sarah as one of the civilians executed. Director Moore claims those responsible will be held accountable, immediately proving himself unreliable once Charlie utilizes his vast technology knowledge to analyze surveillance footage of the attack, identifying each of the mercenaries, only to find out the CIA already has this information and is sitting on it. It’s also heavily implied that the mercenaries carrying out those crimes are in some way connected to Sarah’s murderers.
In a state of denial and anger, Charlie chooses to transfer his inability to process this devastating loss into a blackmailing scheme: give him a crash course in CIA field training so he can kill everyone involved, or risk triggering a dead man’s button that will send digital copies of their war crimes to top journalists around the country. If they refuse, try to stifle him or take him away to a black site or kill him, it will be triggered. There is no way for these crooked CIA directors to know whether or not he is bluffing. Charlie has built a puzzle for them to solve while he goes on his quest, which is a refreshing change of pace from watching the protagonist put together an absurd puzzle of twists and preposterous revelations. It’s also worth mentioning that the no-nonsense, blunt, grinning Holt McCallamy is almost too convincing in the role, as if we should be thankful he doesn’t have this CIA role in the real world.
Shortly after, Charlie’s training commences with the CIA’s Agent Henderson (Laurence Fishburne, putting forth his usual blend of blunt honesty and wisecracking humor), asserting that this brainiac doesn’t have what it takes to pull a trigger. It also turns out Charlie couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn with a firearm, showing that director James Hawes (working from a script by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, based on the book by Robert Littell) has a playful sense of humor, deconstructing and poking fun at what it would be like if an average Joe attempted to enter this dangerous line of work. It’s a concept somewhat abandoned once Charlie begins playing those technological strengths, but it’s fun while it lasts and doesn’t overstay its welcome.
More pleasantly surprising, it’s also an occasionally moving, if clichéd, take on grief and how funneling that into vengeance and violence sounds like the only option, with multiple characters questioning if this is what Charlie wants to put that pain into, if it will help him, and if Sarah would approve of this revenge. At times, Charlie seemingly deludes himself that his actions aren’t only for him. Without giving too much away, he also crosses paths with someone else (Caitríona Balfe), grieving the loss of a loved one who was in a similar line of work.
Frustratingly, The Amateur is filled with supporting characters that either don’t have anything to do or don’t have their involvement dynamic with Charlie fully taken advantage of. It’s a relationship that comes across as the film’s heart, but isn’t introduced until over halfway in, is rushed through, and doesn’t reach the emotional payoff it wants. Jon Bernthal is here as another field operative (a life Charlie supposedly saved, presumably from behind his desk), except he has almost nothing to do with the plot, forced into a key moment. One struggles to believe those characters were this thinly written in the book. By the end, even Laurence Fishburne feels wasted, less like a character and more like a tool for sequel-baiting.
Structurally, The Amateur follows Charlie globetrotting from target to target, once again applying his technological smarts into the real world to devise devious plans to murder each target without technically doing any physical harm, hoping to get information on the whereabouts of their leader in the process. The film doesn’t even explain or show how he accomplishes any of those, making that aspect often far too ridiculous to take seriously, if still reasonably entertaining. It’s also a nice change of pace from the usual generic burst of action found in similar movies, as if the video game Watch Dogs now has an unofficial adaptation.
One of these deranged traps involves rigging the glass at the bottom of a sky pool to crack apart if Charlie doesn’t hear what he wants, while also giving his victim a chance to outswim the collapse (a breathtakingly shot sequence by cinematographer Martin Ruhe, painting him as a technologically demented take on the Jigsaw killer. However, the format becomes repetitive, especially since there is far too much downtime between them setting up the next target. Again, those portions only work when Charlie finds someone to share his grief with, allowing the film to cut into more profound questions about his revenge.
There is nowhere near enough of that, but Rami Malek is captivating in The Amateur, comfortable in each of its tones, whether playing up emotional devastation, ruminating on what was taken for granted, eliciting laughs at being an unfit traditional field agent, or expressing intense thirst for justice. However, almost everything around him is like that sky pool, quickly shattering apart; the narrative miscalculations pile up, and while it is appreciatively grounded in humanity, it drops the ball on the real emotional core of this story.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Robert Kojder is a member of the Chicago Film Critics Association, Critics Choice Association, and Online Film Critics Society. He is also the Flickering Myth Reviews Editor. Check here for new reviews and follow my BlueSky or Letterboxd
