Review by C.J. Bunce
Academy Award winner Rami Malek has already been at the top of the spy-fi genre, playing the last villain to ever cross paths with Daniel Craig’s James Bond in No Time to Die. In The Amateur, now streaming on Hulu, the tables are turned. Malek is now put into the shoes of a young CIA cryptographer named Charlie Heller, a man whose wife is killed as part of an international terrorist incident. When Heller’s bosses don’t pursue the murderers fast enough, he uses his unique knowledge and skills to blackmail them into training him as an operative so he can track them down and kill them on his own. Even if you have difficulty seeing the circumstances as plausible, Malek–possibly the best actor of his generation–has all the grit and passion to keep viewers following along for an international thrill ride on par with the last four James Bond movies.
Of course Malek fans are no strangers to the actor in this kind of role. In the series Mr. Robot, Malek played the ultimate cyber security hacker. Something about Malek’s talent allows him to be both likeable, as when he played Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, and an enigma, as when he played the vile textile heir in Amsterdam. Here you’ll have no problem believing in his mastery at using cutting edge intelligence methods to track anyone, anywhere. He’s another Sherlock Holmes. But the movie is also a drama–we only see his departed wife played by Rachel Brosnahan (the new Lois Lane in Superman) in flashbacks and his hallucination-like daydreams, and his reaction to her death is gutwrenching. Malek completely sells his character’s grief.
Based on a 1981 novel by Legends author Robert Littell, The Amateur: A Novel of Revenge, and a 1981 movie adaptation, the new film runs at a quick clip, with minimum technobabble to pacify those who want all the details, while satisfying the criteria for an action flick that will get you to the end without yawning. Some of the fun happens once he’s bustled under the direction of Laurence Fishburne’s Colonel Henderson, a veteran field agent who might just be able to get someone with no experience ready to kill someone with a gun, face to face.
Caitriona Balfe gets to be the action genre “man in the chair,” the wife of a foreign agent whose husband dies mysteriously, she becomes an insider feeding key intelligence to Charlie, which helps him before and after his wife’s murder. For added fun Jon Bernthal (The Punisher) is a roguish agent who has tapped Charlie for his computer knowledge previously and Adrian Martinez (Stumptown) is another co-worker. Unfortunately both actors are underutilized in the story.
Systematically Charlie works to pick off the villains as he works his way to the ultimate villain behind his wife’s death and a corruption plot, while his own bosses mark him for elimination because (of course!) they have their own reasons for keeping the bad guys alive. The cat-and-mouse chase is the best part of the movie–all good spy action stuff–as Charlie uses his smarts to build bombs and concocts other methods to check off each of his targets.
Watch for Holt McCallany (Mission:Impossible–The Final Reckoning) as Charlie’s boss and Julianne Nicholson (Paradise) as Charlie’s boss’s boss’s boss, who runs her own parallel path to eliminate corruption at the CIA.
It’s not Best Oscar material, nor is it Tom Clancy, but it is a good ride. Catch The Amateur, now streaming on Hulu.
