Rami Malek has one of the more unique faces in Hollywood, and it honestly limits the type of roles he can credibly play. He’s like a tick away from a traditionally handsome leading man, but there’s an expressiveness in his eyes and a Sour Patch suckering in his lips that makes him look alien compared to the average person. That’s a feature of his that is very effective when well-utilized. For example, Freddie Mercury is one of the most unique-looking celebrities to ever live, and Malek embodied all of that aura in Bohemian Rhapsody. Most famously, his sleepless stare fit him well when played a hacker under serious emotional distress in his breakout role on Mr. Robot.
The Amateur gives Malek a role that mostly plays to those specific physical qualities. Malek plays a tech genius operating in the shadows of the CIA’s extensive surveillance system. He’s not as quirky as his Mr. Robot character, but it’s close enough to that feeling. The character is meant to be an everyman thrown into the world of international espionage, as a thirst for revenge drives him into the field. The story is based on a book from the 1980’s by Robert Littell, but it borrows more from modern pop culture spy properties, particularly the Jason Bourne and Taken franchises. The lack of its own identity means that The Amateur can’t help feeling like a forgettable B-movie in many instances, but it is certainly entertaining and competent enough as a second-tier spy thriller.
Malek’s Charlie Heller works in the basement of Langley. He spends hours conducting surveillance, coordinating extractions, and working with international assets willing to share secret documents and data. The routine of his day-to-day life is disrupted when he is sent some very sensitive secrets about the CIA’s shadier operations, fed to him by a mysterious source known only as “Inquiline.” At the same time, Heller learns that his wife Sarah (a terribly underutilized Rachel Brosnahan) has been killed in a terror attack in London. Desperate to avenge her death, Heller blackmails the CIA Deputy Director (Holt McCallany) with those secrets, forcing the agency to train him as an agent who can credibly execute these mercenaries who took Sarah out.
Heller is trained by Colonel Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), a no-nonsense veteran of the field who knows that Charlie is not a killer at his core. What he also recognizes, however, is that his intelligence and experience makes him dangerous to his enemies in a different way. His revenge schemes unfold in a way that is relatively realistic for his limitations. Any time Heller ends up in a physical confrontation, he’s bested with ease. But the script rarely allows him to be in those situations, as he picks off the terrorists with brutal creativity. The most creative assassination is the one dominating the film’s trailers, a pressure cooker that breaks the glass under a pool suspended dozens of stories in the air.
These killings evoke the Taken of it all, as Malek has to play a man who was once gentle giant but is now trying to channel a monstrous rage. The Bourne aspect comes from the hunt inside his own intelligence agency to stop him, happening parallel with a power struggle within the CIA between the Deputy Director and his new boss (Julianne Nicholson, playing the same beats as she does on Paradise). There’s a lot of moving pieces on the chess board, but it never becomes too hard to follow or too complicated. That also means that the way the plot develops can often feel implausible, and leans a lot on Heller’s frequently referenced genius to bail him out of hairy situations. But then again, James Bond also escapes a lot of close calls.
James Hawes, directing only his second film and his first nearing anything of this scale, struggles to make the action memorable. He also sometimes struggles to make it even comprehensible, shooting the brief moments of hand-to-hand combat with a nauseating “shaky cam” style that recalls the worst of the post-Bourne era. He also can’t quite figure out how to get the most out of this extremely overqualified cast. Talented actors like Brosnahan, Jon Bernthal and Michael Stuhlbarg are gifted assets to have in a movie this simple-brained, but they are not given nearly enough runway to make anything happen.
Having said that, the actors who do get their moments to shine severely elevate the weaknesses of the writing. Fishburne and McCallany have played several variations of these character types before, but they are such professionals that their sheer presence makes any scene with them a standout. No matter what they do, however, it all lives and dies with Malek. The role demands him to play various levels of not just his trademark awkwardness, but extreme sadness and despair as well. The Oscar-winner is just credible enough in this role that the movie mostly works.
The Amateur is at its best when it is playing to its strengths. It’s fun to watch Heller wiggle out of the fish-out-of-water peril he creates for himself, particularly as the film globe trots throughout various locations across Europe and Asia. The film certainly works better if you consider it a drama with action as opposed to the other way around. It almost reaches the heights of the movies it copies, but ultimately settles into that range of cable TV enjoyability that is somewhat forgettable, yet still extremely necessary in today’s film industry.
The Amateur opens in theaters on Friday.
