Rami Malek is back on our screens this April with The Amateur. The techno-spy thriller debuts in a year where the box office has not had many blockbuster draws. I saw the trailer in front of countless films, piquing my interest, but I was not sure how this film would play out in terms of getting audiences to the theater. While it looked interesting, this plot resembles most of the techno-spy-thrillers that we have come to love in the past.
The Amateur follows Rami Malek as Heller, a data analyst and decoder for the CIA. After his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered by a Black Ops group, Heller goes on a worldwide odyssey to get revenge on his wife’s killers and find closure.
The plot is very familiar to other movies in the thriller genre, but this techno-thriller stands out in a world where surveillance is everything. Malek is joined by a standout supporting cast featuring Laurence Fishburne, Jon Bernthal (whose name in the film is ironically “The Bear”), Michael Stuhlbarg, Catriona Balfe, Holt McCallany, and Julianne Nicholson. The cast alone is enough to pull people into the theaters, but they are unfortunately used so sparingly. Underutilizing these many talents is arguably the most egregious fault of this film.
The highlights from the supporting cast — and a genuinely great Malek performance — are ruined by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s averagely bland screenplay. The themes and ideas presented here are nothing original. Is revenge really going to give you closure? In the end, is all this killing worth it? Are you truly a killer when it comes down to it? From The Fugitive (1993) to The Bourne Identity (2002) to Jack Ryan (2018-2023), it felt that Nolan and Spinillei were just recycling ideas and updating them to fit a modern-day technological story.
The pacing is another issue; it drags considerably in portions. There are moments where characters randomly find out details they need just to progress the story forward without any explanation as to how they got to these answers. For a film that needs you to suspend your disbelief, these details pulled me out of the movie entirely.
For a spy film, the action choreography is bland at best, largely because, for nearly the entire run time, Malek is truly terrified to shoot anyone. His fear requires him to use his intelligence and coding experience to make Jigsaw-like traps for his wife’s killers, making himself think that he is keeping his hands clean yet choosing to take the coward’s way out with most of his executions.
Unfortunately, the marketing and trailers give away nearly every elaborate kill, so, by the time we got to these set pieces, I immediately knew what was going to happen. This leads to all the tension being sucked out of the room entirely. At my screening, all the kills that are shown in the trailer had no genuine reactions, but the one kill that wasn’t shown got a great reaction from my crowd which drives this point home.
James Hawes’ creative direction is what kept me intrigued for most of this runtime, though, and is what keeps the majority of this film afloat. The fluid camera decisions boost the bland script, and most of the set pieces are done in a creative way. It is unfortunate that these creative set pieces are given away in the majority of the marketing materials. Hawes has a good eye and it makes me excited to see what he can do with a good to great script.
While watching The Amateur, I just wanted to go home and immediately put on The Bourne Identity. What The Bourne Identity and The Fugitive have to help this is an overarching thread of mystery; wondering how we got into these situations, and wanting to learn how they are going to get out of them. The Amateur has no real mystery, being very straightforward. There are enough twists and turns to keep you from feeling bored, but some of these twists come out of nowhere with no real resolution as to how they were achieved.
While you may not be bored, The Amateur never goes above and beyond to stand out in the sea of thrillers it tries to be a part of. At the end of the day, the film is pure and unbridled “Dad Cinema,” which can work for a lot of people, and, in some places, it did work for me. By the time the credits rolled, I felt I had watched something I had seen countless times before, and I think a majority of audiences while having fun with this will feel the same way too.
The Amateur releases wide everywhere this Friday, April 11th.
Review Courtesy of Jacob Diedenhofer
Feature Image Credit to 20th Century Studios and John Wilson