Film Review: "The Amateur"
The new spy film features a strong performance from Rami Malek, but it wastes the rest of its talented cast ant doesn't do much with its melodramatic plot.
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Warning: Full spoilers for the film follow.
The Amateur is one of those films that I was actually really looking forward to. We haven’t seen a lot of Rami Malek lately, and I had high hopes that, based on the trailers at least, this was going to once again give him a chance to do what he does best: play strangely intense weirdos. To some extent that ended up being true. As I’ve sat with the film for the last week or so, however, I’ve come to realize that, despite its great potential, it ends up being a rather lackluster effort that’s easy to forget once you’ve seen it.
Before I get into the meat of it, though, here’s the major summary. Charlie Heller (Malek), works for the CIA as an analyst. While his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan, in a thankless role) goes on a business trip to London he ends up discovering shady and manipulative dealings among the higher-ups at the CIA. When Sarah is killed, he’s essentially fobbed off by said superiors, until his blackmail forces them to send him to a ruthless operative for “training,” Robert “Hendo” Harrison (Laurence Fishburne). After Hendo is given the order to kill Charlie, the latter sets off on a mission to hunt down those who killed his wife, and he’s aided in this by a longtime Russian asset of the CIA, codenamed Inquiline (Caitríona Balfe). Revenge shenanigans, and no small number of deaths, ensue.
Now, to be fair, this film does work on some registers. I’m always happy to go along with a male revenge melodrama, and in this respect the film delivers. Malek, unsurprisingly, brings an intensity to his characterization of Charlie that is quite compelling to watch, making the most of his chiseled features and protuberant eyes to capture the emotional anguish of a man whose wife has been killed and who has been forced to confront the reality that the men that he works for are hopelessly corrupt and willing to sacrifice American soldiers’ lives for opaque political goals. As the film goes on and he confronts more and more of his own inner darkness, Malek shows us that there’s far more to Charlie than meets the eye.
Unfortunately for Malek, the film’s story doesn’t really do a lot to support or help his performance. One thing you have to know about a film like this one is that there are going to be a lot of narrative twists and, given that it’s a sort of spy thriller, you should expect some of these to not make a great deal of sense. Even so, there are some leaps in logic and technological possibility in this film that are sure to strain the credulity of even the most credulous viewer. Some of these I’m happy to go along with, but it has to be said that things really only happen in The Amateur because the plot needs to happen to get Charlie where he needs to be. It seems that those responsible for writing far too many contemporary conspiracy thrillers–like Apple TV’s equally frustrating Prime Target–have forgotten that their films have to at least be somewhat plausible in order for the viewer to have any emotional investment in what’s going on.
The Amateur’s gravest crime isn’t its rather incoherent plot or the many different twists and turns that don’t add up to a great deal. Instead, I found myself most frustrated by the fact that it makes so little use of a cast that, on paper, should be one of its biggest selling points. Malek, as I’ve said, is perfectly fine and often quite good. There’s not a great deal of depth to his character, but what there is he mines for some genuinely affecting moments (his grief in the aftermath of Sarah’s death is particularly wrenching to watch).
Less forgivable is the way that this film does so little with Caitríona Balfe. If you’ve seen Catriona Balfe in Outlander you know what she’s capable of, but here she does little more than speak in a vaguely Russian accent and provide Charlie with various types of intel. She’s also dispatched in a way that is both quite brutal–she’s shot in the chest while they are trying to get away–and then left in a parking garage. This is, I think, a sure sign that a film doesn’t really know what to do with anyone other than its main characters which, in turn, means that we’re left not feeling particularly strongly whether any of them manage to make it out alive or not. (And don’t get me started on the fact that this film’s female characters basically just exist so that they can get shot and give the hero more motivation to seek out their killers).
Laurence Fishburne is given at least a little more to do. His Hendo is bluff and no-nonsense, and he’s also a cold-blooded killer, forged into a weapon by the CIA. There’s humanity there, however, and Fishburne imbues the character with his own unique soulfulness. It’s also a lot of fun to see him on-screen with Malek, particularly since Hendo sees Charlie for the genuinely good guy that he is. Still, I found myself wishing that they’d given Fishburne more to do, if only because he would have injected some much-needed human heart into the film.
To some extent a film like this one sinks or swims based on the strength of its villain, and in this regard it just doesn’t work. Michael Stuhlbarg does all that he can with the limited screen time that he’s been given, and in his usual way he brings a quiet yet devastating intensity to his explanation for why he shot Sarah: he had to prove to the police that his terrorist group meant business. However, because he’s been such a shadowy figure for much of the film, it’s impossible to really care all that much about his motivations, still less
Even his arrest doesn’t really land with the full force that we might assume, given that so much of the film has centered on Charlie's relentless and ruthless efforts to track down and destroy the man who was responsible for killing his wife. Once it’s all said and done he’s just…shuffled away. Charlie deciding not to kill the man in cold blood is commendable and believable–we’ve seen throughout the film that while he’s ruthless in some ways, he isn’t a killer at heart. However, the scene is frustratingly anticlimactic and doesn’t really serve the melodramatic narrative that we’ve already been given.
And what of the politics of it all? Beneath its melodramatic plot, there’s a message about the dangers of intelligence agencies going rogue, and a secondary plot involves Charlie exposing the nefarious dealings of his superiors, and the new CIA Director (Julianne Nicholson, who is also largely wasted) ends up cracking down on illicit activities. This whole message of government accountability rings quite hollow in the present moment, when Trump and his cronies continue to run roughshod over anything even remotely resembling honest governance. A subtler and more impactful film than The Amateur might have at least given us the feeling that we were living vicariously through it but, alas, it doesn’t really have the ballast to have such relevance.
All of that being said, I will admit that I quite enjoyed The Amateur. It might not be truly great spy cinema, but it’s at least entertaining. It’s not particularly memorable or substantive but, these days, there are far worse things coming out of Hollywood.