Buoyed by Malek's strong central performance and a novel twist on the spy thriller, The Amateur does it's job.
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Ever since his Oscar win, studios haven't had a clear idea of what to do with Rami Malek. I think a lot of that has to do with Malek's public persona which is more reserved and shy, which is both a bit humorous considering he won an Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury, and also makes it harder to slot him into studio films that like big performances. There's a reason a lot of his most acclaimed work has been in indepedent films and a TV show that looked and felt like an indie film, Mr. Robot. But with The Amateur it appears they've found a nice fit for Malek, a relunctant, and kinda shitty, action hero.
The Setup
Malek stars as Charlie Heller, a CIA crytographer and tech genius who enjoys a quiet life doing his work and living in a farmhouse with his beloved wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan). But Heller's life is thrown into turmoil after Sarah is captured and killed in a terrorist attack. When the CIA drags its feet bringing the responsible parties to justice, Heller decides to force his way into the field to handle the problem himself.
There's a lot I like about The Amateur. Namely the pitch. In most revenge thrillers there's an undercurrent of "these people have no idea of who they messed with..." See Yosef basically wanting to hurl his phone and his body off a skyscraper once he hears that his son f***ed with John Wick. While that's certainly the case here, since Charlie is described as a genius, he's also not a fighter. Which means his paths to revenge will inherently require a lot of careful planning and outmanuevering his pray vs. besting them in hand to hand combat, because he's not gonna win that way. This is also why you see a lot of Saw comparisons since his plans frequently involve elaborate death traps or superhuman technology applications.
The movie also forgoes deifying Charlie by making him pretty incompetent in a number of ways and shows him failing or barely scraping by through sheer luck or technical prowess multiple times.
This is also the perfect role for a guy like Malek. The thing I like about Malek is that he's so good at looking/seeming detached but his eyes and face are ridiculously expressive. He's also superb at using pauses before he speaks to let you know exactly what he feels and thinks before he says a word. So when he's winding up to chew out his superiors you can see the anger in his eyes and hear how many words he's swallowing/not saying. And as much as actors are not the part they've previously played, Malek playing another computer/tech genius as he did in Mr. Robot adds meta-credibility to him being a CIA tech genius.
I also like that movie spends time to reflect on what this really is for Charlie. It's a coping mechanism for his grief. For him, these people being alive and free in the world in unacceptable since Sarah isn't in this world anymore and an empty house that his superiors want him to stay in is just a reminder of what he doesn't have anymore. The one person he truly loved, because Charlie doesn't form connections easily.
So if the central emotional angle and lead performance all work really well, what holds this movie back?
In my opinion there's two big things, which in turn makes some of the other issues more obvious. The first big thing is how Charlie ends up in the field. I get why this plotline is here. We need Charlie out in the field, but he's not a field agent, nor do his superiors want him chasing these people. So he blackmails them by threatening to expose some shady operations. That by itself creates ongoing tension between Charlie and his potential allies which means he's more on an island and has fewer resources at his diposal. In terms of tension, that's great. In terms of what it means for the story...hard to say.
The blackmail material Charlie has is all about how his superiors have done things like false flag operations or killed civilians. So maybe that's why they don't care so much about Charlie's wife? It's unclear why this isn't important to them. I think it would mean a lot more if there was some emotional connection or direct connection between these folks and the folks that killed Charlie's wife.
The second big thing is an underexplored throughline about Charlie's ability/willingness to kill. When Charlie is going through his C.I.A. training his mentor tells him point blank, "you're not a killer," and most of Charlie's actions, even towards his initial target indicate this is true. But soon Charlie is setting up traps where the only end result is death and now it's a conversation about "killing up close." All before we seem to shift again.
There's a part of me that really likes the idea of Charlie's humanity and unwillingness to kill being core to his success and finding justice and the movie's flip-flopping made me pine for a different version of this story.
The Verdict: It's Alright
Buoyed by Malek's strong central performance and a novel twist on the spy thriller, The Amateur does it's job. 6/10
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