Semi-Pro
You know what? ‘The Winter Soldier’ did paranoid espionage thrillers better.
The Amateur
Director: James Hawes • Writers: Ken Nolan, Gary Spinelli, based on the book by Richard Littell
Starring: Rami Malek, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Bernthal, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, Michael Stuhlbarg
USA • 2hrs 3mins
Opens Hong Kong April 10 • IIA
Grade: C+
Somewhere in idyllic Virginia, where all the shrubbery-shrouded Craftsman homes with Shaker interiors are decorated by well-heeled, highly educated couples, CIA nerd-slash-cryptographer Charles Heller (Rami Malek, No Time to Die) is seeing his… anthropologist? Climate scientist? Economist? wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) off to the airport. She’s headed to London for a conference, and he’s not joining her once again. It’s his thing. Staying at home. Charles heads into Quantico, to his office in the ultra-secure basement where I guess he decrypts and intercepts signals intelligence. One day, after missing a call from his wife the night before, he gets a visit from CIA Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany, awesome as usual) to come up to new Director Samantha O’Brien’s (Julianne Nicholson) office pronto. They’d both like a word. Charles is sure it has something to do with the cache of files he got from an anonymous informant, Inquiline, about a pile of illegal ops the Agency was running all over the world. Strangely, Charles is surprised by these illegalities. And he’s supposed to be smart.
But he’s not in trouble; they’re simply informing him that Sarah was tragically killed in a terrorist hostage situation at her London hotel. After a few days of shock, then numbing rage, Charles uses his mad spy skillz to piece together the event and present the story to Moore. Gobsmacked that Moore and his henchman Caleb Horowitz (Danny Sapani, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare) know the what and the who, he strikes a deal. Give him some CIA murder training and he won’t go to The Washington Post with what he knows about their black ops. He just wants to kill the dudes who killed his wife.
It almost feels like the 1970s
As OTT spy thrillers go The Amateur isn’t a terrible idea, and to its credit it has a couple of cool spy craft-y sequences and shady high-tech homicides suitable for at least a couple of episodes of director James Hawes’s last gig, Slow Horses. But we’re meant to empathise with Charles’s near-crippling fury and frustration and also feel his conflicted emotions when he starts putting what CIA training colonel Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne, awesome as usual), or Hendo, into practice. As Charles’s quest for vengeance goes on and the stakes get higher, he runs headlong into a series of ethical quagmires we’re supposed to wonder if he can handle, as Hendo repeatedly tells him he cannot. But unlike Slow Horses, The Amateur doesn’t have Gary Oldman and Kristen Scott Thomas trading barbs. It has the baffling Malek doing his level best to look like he’s feeling something. Malek – an Oscar winner don’t forget – seems unwilling, unable, or both to make Charles look anything close to a torn, grieving husband or, let’s face it, a badass. In a few scenes as an equally wounded Julian Assange-type Caitríona Balfe (Outlander) runs circles around him and seems to prove what we’ve all been thinking for a while: that the Freddy Mercury job was a fluke and Malek will forever be Mr Robot, whose blandness was entirely the point.
The Amateur is also a a remake of the obscure 1981 Canadian film by British director Charles Jarrott, with John Savage in the Charles role, and as clunky as that version was in parts, it did have a grimy ’70s frisson and the lingering whiff of paranoid Watergate-era thrillers like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor going for it – which this is trying to emulate and not succeeding at. The ’81 version also had a kicker of an opening segment (set in Munich) that instantly gave Charles’s motivation more weight. Not only is Malek not really up to the task of signalling fear, rage and crushing loss he doesn’t even have an inciting incident worth watching.
Still there’s something here. Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s modern script does ring true, from the skeevy CIA big shots who are convinced they’re above the law, to the London location, and the statelessness of state-sanctioned crime. The film gets bonus points for Fishburne, McCallany, Michael Stuhlbarg crushing his single moment as an icy arms dealer and a shamefully underused (be still my heart) Jon Bernthal as (no shit) The Bear, an enigmatic agent who tries to lay some wisdom on Charles. They’re bright spots in an otherwise murky workaday thriller that thinks it’s saying more than it really is. The Amateur is the kind of film that should either be a globe-trotting romp defined by its gadgets or a damning condemnation of corrupt official actors and the threat they pose to our freedoms. This falls forgettably in between.