For the first time since “Mr. Robot,” Rami Malek is returning to the wonderful world of hacking the world wide web.
In “The Amateur,” directed by James Hawes and co-written by Gary Spinelli and Ken Nolan, Malek plays Charles Heller, a CIA cryptographer who, after his wife is killed in a London terrorist attack, blackmails the CIA into sending him out into the field so he can avenge her death. But this isn’t your run of the mill spy revenge thriller, oh no – this one is different, you see, because Charles – nerdy, quiet Charles – hates killing people.
Or, more truthfully, he’s really bad at killing people. At least with a gun. Give him an explosive? He’ll get the job done.
“The Amateur” slots nicely into a genre I’m deeming “wife-guy action cinema,” in which a handsome, solemn man’s wife (or his love interest in some capacity) dies and he feels some type of way about it. That feeling usually ends up with him on the run. “The Fugitive,” “Inception,” “Memento” – Christopher Nolan excels at this type of movie. “Gladiator” sits adjacent to this genre, as does “Django Unchained.” This is essentially the entire basis for the comic book character the Punisher (funnily enough, Jon Bernthal, who plays the Punisher, is in this movie). I could go on.
“The Amateur” might have the trappings of this type of movie, but it swaps that typical strapping star for a very different type of leading man in Malek. Still handsome, but a little reedier, a little shyer – the smart revenge-seeker rather than the strong one. But, despite the fact that we’re told that Charles has an IQ of 170, “The Amateur” isn’t a very smart film at all, and offers a far cry from the excitement these types of movies can provide at their best. It’s a spy thriller with more lulls than twists, and a waste of a talented cast.
Charles’ blackmail is proof that some CIA higher ups have been secretly bombing high-priority targets in the Middle East and blaming the carnage on suicide bombers. The blackmail tactic works for a while, but eventually the CIA decides that Charles is more trouble than he’s worth, sending Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) to track him down and kill him.
As presented, Charles isn’t exactly a character who is easy to understand. He has an IQ of 170, yet he doesn’t wear gloves when he’s ransacking through a suspect’s apartment. Henderson – the best in the biz, the man picked to train and then track Charles on his globe-trotting revenge adventure – somehow loses the freshly minted field agent at every turn. Charles has never been out of the country, a fact we are reminded of constantly, and yet he jet sets across multiple European cities with ease. He can barely fire a gun at a target, much less at a person, without freezing up, yet he has no problem blowing up a bomb two feet away from someone’s face.
In other words, Charles is presented as the type of guy you wouldn’t expect to be able to pull this off, but very quickly turns into an absolute lunatic. For his part, Malek historically has been able to pull off that dual mode, but in “The Amateur” he is both twitchy and paranoid, and yet incredibly flat for the entire runtime. There is zero inflection in his voice, and yet his eyes never stop moving around (literally, not once). If Charles is supposed to become more appealing, coming into his own as the movie progresses, that growth never happens. So much so that when a Russian widow-turned-asset (a miscast Caitríona Balfe) starts developing the hots for Charles, it’s groan-inducing at best.
But Malek’s performance isn’t the only issue. With the exception of Rachel Brosnahan as Charles’ wife Sarah and Michael Stuhlbarg as the big bad who comes in with 15 minutes to spare, everyone sort of feels like they’re sleepwalking. And even if Brosnahan is exceedingly charming, she’s relegated to the role of “sexy ghost wife” before she really gets the chance to do all that much.
For some cast members – like Fishburne, or Bernthal as a hot shot field agent, or Holt McCallany as a corrupt CIA boss – they’re playing archetypes they’ve played a hundred times before, roles that they very well can do in their sleep and still come out on the other side looking alright. But still, the tiredness of those performances, and the lack of coherency at every turn, seeps into every corner of the film, making for a very sleepy time at the movies.
