Malek plays a geeky secret agent and a deranged genius in an entertaining but uncomplicated revenge film that blends many other films.
Charlie Heller (Rami Malek), the geeky secret agent and deranged genius protagonist of "The Amateur," is a CIA analyst working five floors underground in Langley, in the Decryption and Analysis department. There, he is a master of all things coded and virtual, a surveillance hacker par excellence.
Director: James Hawes
Writers: Ken Nolan, Gary Spinelli, Robert Littell
Stars: Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Jon Bernthal
Outside the office, he and his adoring wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), reside in a renovated farmhouse and seem to have the perfect life. So when Sarah, on a corporate trip to London, is taken hostage by a group of terrorists and killed instantly, it's as if Charlie's existence has been completely erased. Since the tragedy was an international incident, his superiors at the Agency assure him that the perpetrators will be hunted down. But that's not enough for Charlie. It won't quell his rage, his desire for revenge. Instead, Charlie says, "I want to kill them myself."
He'll have to go rogue to do it. After all, what good would a revenge movie be if revenge were legal? The fact that one is breaking the law is what gives it that special rawness. The revenge movie as we know it dates back to "Joe" (1970), in which the hard-hatted construction worker, played by Peter Boyle, went to war against a hippie commune, but of course, the revenge movies that formed it were "Walking Tall" (1973) and "Death Wish" (1974), which were about men wielding a weapon (a pistol, a hickory club) and getting revenge. The revenge movie helped lay the groundwork for the conservative revolution; before Fox News, its "No Mercy" narrative was repeated on 10,000 right-wing talk radio shows. The culmination of that legacy might well be the centrality of revenge to Donald Trump's agenda. There are times when he seems less like the President than the Punisher.
In his time, part of the power of revenge films lay in their subversive, antisocial edge. Charles Bronson, in "Death Wish," played a mild-mannered architect who, after the murder of his wife, connected with his inner thug. In cinema, that's the "euphoria" of revenge: it allows you to feel righteous and beyond the law. But "The Amateur," after many decades of such films, has been made with a sophisticated technological aesthetic, utilitarian mastery, and a deadpan absurdity that allows the genre to feel as fluid as a video game.
Charlie, in his CIA bunker, is not a violent man, and the film's hook is that, even when he spirals out of control, he steers clear of his violent impulses. He's not a very good shooter (he's nearsighted), and he doesn't become the kind of bare-knuckle fighter that almost all action heroes are. He's not a man of action; he's a man of planning. Even as he goes from Paris to Marseille, from Istanbul to the Baltic coast, chasing criminals who are sort of independent arms dealers for evil nation-states, he's still, in a sense, behind that desk, hacking and manipulating, executing his homemade traps—though what this makes you feel is that he's seen too many movies.
Perhaps that's why "The Amateur" isn't as powerful. It's directed, with anonymous efficiency, by James Hawes, a British television director who has directed episodes of "Doctor Who," and the script, by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli (based on a novel by Robert Littell), never ceases to surprise us. But there's a difference between teasing unexpected twists and earning them. It may seem churlish to complain that a covert thriller is an impossible mission, but much of what happens in "The Amateur" seems… arbitrary. Charlie shows up in an exotic location, tracks down one of the assassins in question, and confronts him, trying to get him to reveal the location of the group's leader. When he refuses, you'd better believe the suspended glass pool the killer is taking a midnight dip in is rigged with explosives. At times, "The Amateur" could have been called "The Detonator."
At first, Charlie tries to blackmail his CIA supervisors after uncovering an Agency cover-up of a coordinated drone strike that killed 1,000 civilians. But blackmailing the CIA is never a good idea. To buy time, the Agency's sinister deputy director, Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), goes along with Charlie's little revenge scheme, even giving him special "training" under Agency veteran Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), who assesses him by saying, "You're not a killer." The training happens so quickly it's almost a joke; the point is, for Charlie, learning how to navigate these action clichés doesn't quite click.
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