Revenge movies that see a bereaved lead switch to a life of murder can usually burn one of two ways. The first is, naturally, hot and takes the form of a chaotic rampage that hurtles through its run time powered by rage, carnage and some crowd pleasing acts of violence until justice has been done. The other form, however, is completely the opposite that sees the desperate urge to balance the scales take a slower, more measured and colder path to the exact same goal and this is the part that The Amateur has chosen to walk.
Essentially taking the basic framework of a country-hopping, smarts-focused Jason Bourne film and then dropping in the twist that our main protagonist can’t fight his way out of a wet paper bag, The Amateur attempts to try and offer us slightly a more sober take on revenge as it blends it with the spy genre to give us a brooding thriller that gives us a whole bunch of subterfuge with its grief. Oh, and acting tics. A whoooooole lot of acting tics.
Charlie Heller is a mild-mannered CIA cryptographer who is good at his job, bad at making friends and enjoys a loving relationship with his understanding wife, Sarah. He spends his days decrypting code with ease as he struggles with daily social interactions with his colleagues or a bullish, alpha male agent known as the Bear, but pulling him away from all of this is the fact that an anonymous online source known only as “Inquiline” has clued him in to some decidedly illegal operations his bosses have been pull on the global stage.
However, while this is all extremely pertinent, his Big Bang Theory meets Enemy Of The State style existence soon comes crashing down when Charlie finds out that his wife has been killed in London during a terrorist shootout when a weapons sale went horribly wrong. Obviously distraught, the timid keyboard approaches his corrupt superiors and gives them something of a bizarre ultimatum: train him just enough in field operations and let him go after his wife’s killers and he won’t expose their dirty laundry to the world.
Weighing up their options, the top brass agree and team him up with a harsh tutor in the form of the hyper-scary Colonal Robert Henderson who puts him through his paces while the blackmailed bosses race to uncover his hidden evidence; but even though Henderson declares that Charlie is incapable of pulling a trigger, the determined little computer geek learns just enough to head out on his own to take out the four terrorists who shot his spouse.
But can this mousey little man possibly have a snowballs chance in hell traversing across the globe and trying to kill four terrorists with the CIA trying to take him down at every turn and can he get over the fact that he’s simply not a killer when the time comes to do the deed?
Technically a remake of a movie made back in the 80s (I didn’t know that either until about twenty minutes ago), The Amateur immediately tries to set itself apart from every other spy film made over the last twenty years by presenting a main character that’s basically as wet as a soaking sponge. Defiantly dropping all notions of “superspies” and near omnipotent agents in the vein of Jason Bourne, Jack Bauer and James Bond, James Hawes’ slow and steady thriller aims to be the complete and total antithesis of such gung-ho, jingoistic and lunk headed movies as American Assassin and instead strives to omit any patriotic leanings linked to geopolitical revenge.
It does this by simply having its lead actor, the notoriously twitchy Rami Malek, let loose of the chain and deliver the most fidgety, nervous, eye-darting, tic laden performance the actor has ever delivered, which is saying a lot when you figure that the gecko-eyed actor isn’t particularly known for playing chilled guys. In fact, it feels more than anything that Malek is trying to return to the mindset of Mr. Robot, the brain frying TV show that put him on the map in the first place, but even then, Charlie Heller manages to make Elliot Alderson look like Jeffrey “The Dude” Lebowski in comparison. Malek seems dead set on losing himself in this role totally and piles on as much emptional and mental baggage that the script will allow (despite bring terminally awkward and wracked with grief, the film also lightly hints that he may very be on the spectrum somewhere, also it never actually states as such) and as a result, he does turn in an admittedly complex performance. However, I will say that while he seems to have measured every twitch, blink and eye-dart to dramatic perfection, his performance actually ends up being quite distracting, almost as if he’s desperate to show us all how good an actor he really is.
As a result, virtually everyone else is sort of reduced to a glorified cameo role that swirls around the white dwarf of Malek’s acting. Holt McCallany brings more of that bullish authority he brought to Mindhunter; future Lois Lane Rachel Brosnahan attempts to cement her loving wife in flashbacks an visions; Laurence Fishburne has fun bellowing lines as Charlie’s stern teacher; Michael Stuhlberg does soft spoken villain as the movie’s “final boss” and even the ubiquitous Jon Bernthal rocks up for two scenes to play the type of typically manly, hulking agent that Charlie would give his left nut to be able to emulate. And yet, while Malek is painstakingly plying his craft, everyone else seems to be effortlessly doing more with less and being just as memorable.
Not helping matters further is the choice to make the film very slow and very deliberate which tends to drain a lot of the tension out of a scenario that should have us grinding our nails down to the quick with our teeth. Its good that the film ponders the conundrum of becoming a killer for revenge purposes and measures the weight of deliberately relinquishing sections of your soul with every life taken, but the movie toys with this thread so much, it removes most of the momentum such a thriller should have. And yet, while the movie alternates between Charlie knocking up Saw-style traps to take out the guilty parties and fleeing his CIA persuers in Borne-style foot chases – you strangely never get the feeling that Charlie is actually in danger despite having all the brawling skills of Louis Tully from Ghostbusters.
It’s an admirable thing to have such themes in a revenge themed spy film where lives are especially cheap, but the pace is so slow and the deaths so familiar, that it’s tough to enjoy it any more than just on a surface level. One assassination (involving pollen of all things) starts off well but ultimately ends with a punchline straight out of Final Destination and another that sees the destruction of a high rise swimming pool has essentially been done before in The Mechanic sequel – and if your main setpiece has been done before by Jason Statham; you’ve messed up.
Slick, brooding and containing Malek’s most look-at-me-I’m-acting role to date; with a bit of tightening up, The Amateur could have still put across its more existential points without sacrificing pace and excitement in the attempt and while there’s some enjoyment to be had here, the story rambles too much to really turn pro.
The Bourne Timidity.
🌟🌟🌟
We Have Issues 