THE AMATEUR REVIEW

“Suffers from having a fairly weak and obvious premise … made even worse by an absolutely charisma-free performance by Rami Malek”

There are movies where you watch a trailer that’s meant to show off the best a movie has to offer, and sometimes, it gets you excited about the movie, and other times, it makes you question whether the movie can deliver on what it is promising. That was definitely what I felt the two or three times I’ve seen the trailer for The Amateur, a new conspiracy action-thriller from 20th Century that puts Rami Malek in the role of Charlie Heller, a low-level CIA decoder that seeks to get revenge for the murder of his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan).

If you’ve seen that trailer, then you know pretty much what to expect, although that trailer doesn’t make you realize how much of the movie is set inside the CIA offices with Charlie’s supervisor (played by Holt McCallany in one his meatier film roles) discussing how to deal with the problem of Charlie, while he’s out in the field trying to find the people responsible for his wife’s death in a London terrorist attack. Along the way, Charlie encounters Esther (Tiffany Gray), who helps Charlie find those responsible.

Director James Dawes previously directed episodes of the Apple TV+ series, “Slow Horses,” and the Anthony Hopkins drama, One Life, and though he doesn’t do bad tackling an action movie, the film never does very much with the premise of an unskilled man wanting revenge, especially when we have so many skilled killers played by Jason Statham or Liam Neeson doing a much better job. Like many movies, most notably the Jason Bourne* films, The Amateur is set up as a global conspiracy thriller with Malek bopping from one country to the next, trying to find the men who killed his wife. (*I can tell you without fear of contradition that Bourne never EVER shopped at a Krogers.)

There are so many aspects to the movie that should have made it better, like when Laurence Fishburne shows up as a veteran agent assigned to train Charlie but then ends up trailing him in the field. He’s just some of the talent that is utterly wasted in this movie, including Jon Bernthal, who appears briefly at the beginning for no particular reason and then again in a meet-up with Charlie in the field, and then he’s gone and forgotten. Some actors I really love like Julianne Nicholson and Adrian Martinez are also underused and are basically just there. On the other hand, when Michael Stuhlbarg shows up as the “final boss,” he’s just so great, and it just leaves you wishing there was more of him earlier in the movie. Casting so many great actors around Malek just makes it that much more obvious how boring he is as an actor, giving a performance that seems far below that of an actor who won an Oscar for playing one of the most charismatic rock stars of all time.

Some of the bigger kills were also completely given away in the trailer, and by knowing that they’re coming, they just don’t feel nearly as exciting. There’s some other action moments, but this is mostly about Charlie using his skills to find and kill the people responsible for his wife’s death and how that connects back to his CIA minders. (There was a moment early in the film where I was expecting Sarah to end up not having been killed, and I was fully ready to knock five points off my score for the movie if that indeed happen.)

The Amateur suffers from having a fairly weak and obvious premise that isn’t that well executed, made even worse by an absolutely charisma-free performance by Rami Malek. Being released so closely to the far superior Steven Soderbergh spy-thriller, Black Bag, doesn’t help its case either.

Rating: 5/10

The Amateur opens nationwide on Friday, April 11 with previews on Thursday.