With so many movies these days being massive VFX-heavy epics about invincible superheroes, it's a little disorienting to watch a small revenge thriller of the kind that was common in the 1990s. So it is with The Amateur, a modest global caper flick with some twists.
Rami Malek (Mr. Robot) stars as Charlie Heller, a CIA cryptographer who's married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan, Superman), a businesswoman who was attending a conference in London when she was taken hostage and killed by terrorists who were fleeing a botched arms deal in the hotel she was at. It was a random event and she was just an unfortunate bystander.
Using the CIA's Yeah, Right technology (i.e. tech in movies/shows which does the impossible like enhance a full-color hi-rez image of someone off a few pixels in a reflection and makes me say, "Yeah, right!") he determines who the terrorists were and approaches his boss, CIA Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany, Mindhunter), with the expectation they'd be brought to justice, but his request is denied because the leader, Horst Schiller (Michael Stuhlbarg, Men in Black 3), who pulled the trigger was a terrorism kingpin and they want to roll up his entire network and to capture this handful would interfere.
Outraged, Charlie uses information from a secret source that Moore and others were hiding malfeasance, blaming accidental US military killings on terrorist IEDs, to threaten Moore with exposure unless he's sent to The Farm, a CIA facility, for training so he can personally hunt and terminate the bad guys. He claims he has a dead man's switch which will send the evidence to the media if they try to disappear him, so they reluctantly agree while frantically tearing his home apart to verify whether he actually has the goods.
At The Farm he's handed over to Robert "Hendo" Henderson (Laurence Fishburne, Pee-Wee's Playhouse) who rapidly determines Charlie simply doesn't have it in him to kill someone. He's a terrible shot, barely able to hit a target unless he's within nearly punching distance, but he does show an aptitude for improvised explosives. After a time, Moore decides Charlie was bluffing and orders Hendo to whack him. Fortunately for Charlie, he'd already bugged out with the fake passports the CIA had cooked up for him and headed to Europe to hunt his wife's killers with Hendo in pursuit.
In contrast to the usual superspies like James Bond and Jason Bourne, Charlie not only lacks their JB initials, but is actually pretty bad at vigilantism. He comes up with a clever way to deal with his first target, but the way they die is a total fluke. He manages to get better at it - the trailer gives away the most spectacular case - but his final takedown is a bit convenient.
While adapted from a novel which was also made into a 1981Canuckian feature starring John Savage and Christopher Plummer, the screenplay by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down, but also Transformers: The Last Knight, a movie I bought in 2017 and still haven't watched because everyone says it's so bad) and Gary Spinelli (American Made) feels generic and formulaic. It suffers from the thing where the world's population is limited to just the characters in the movie so Charlie seems to have no friends or family or in-laws also mourning Sarah's killing. Jon Bernthal appears twice as a CIA field operative, but contributes nothing so why is the character even there?
Malek is OK in his usual twitchy bug-eyed Eliot Alderson way and Fishburne basically plays a cross between Morpheus (The Matrix) and the Bowery King (John Wick 2-4). Brosnahan is appealing in her flashbacks, but everyone is playing the script which isn't stretching many boundaries.
The Dolby Vision presentation has some brief moments of bright highlights, but the generally gray spy movie color palette limits eye candy opportunities.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.
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