Amateur, The (United States, 2025)

If you’re looking for a fun, revenge-oriented thriller, The Amateur doesn’t deliver. (Go check out John Wick instead.) If the goal is to find a modern-day spy story, you won’t find that here, either. (Consider streaming the vastly superior Slow Horses instead). So what does this movie offer? Enough good scenes to construct a compelling trailer, perhaps, but not a lot more. It’s essentially Jason Bourne on Vicodin with a little Death Wish sprinkled on top. It’s slow, with long stretches where not a lot happens, steeped in grief, and unable to deliver a legitimate catharsis. The ending in particular is problematical, stretching the film’s overall tendencies toward the absurd to hard-to-swallow lengths. Despite its seeming attempts to feel grounded, it makes the most outlandish of the Bond films (that would be Moonraker) seem realistic and low-key by comparison.

The lead character of Charlie, a CIA programmer, is played by Rami Malek in full Mr. Robot mode. He’s a brilliant man with a great capacity for analysis and innovation, but he’s emotionally stunted, socially awkward, and probably autistic. He also lacks the killer instinct, as is pointed out by Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), an operative charged with training him in the fine art of assassination. The first things we learn about Charlie is that he has two loves in life: his job and his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan). We know from the first time we see her that she’s a “Dead Woman Walking.” Even if one hasn’t seen the trailers, which hammer home this particular plot point, it’s obvious from the way director James Hawes frames the idyllic husband-and-wife scenes. 

When Sarah is killed in a brazen London hostage-taking incident, Charlie, unable to cope with being alone, decides to avenge his wife’s death by tracking down her three killers: Blazhic (Marc Rissmann), Ellish (Joseph Millson), and Schiller (Michael Stuhlberg). When his boss, Deputy Director Moore (Holt McCallany), laughs at the ludicrous notion of sending an untried analyst into the field, Charlie counters by blackmailing him. Moore seemingly relents but in reality plots to have Charlie killed.

In addition to its various narrative implausibilities (suspension of disbelief will only get you so far), The Amateur suffers from trying to do too much. The film’s attempts to dovetail the spy elements with the revenge-thriller aspect never really work. The movie features far too much pointless running around as Charlie attempts to locate his targets, a lot of rambling exposition, and too many “magical” leaps of faith. There are also characters with no seeming purpose (Jon Bernthal’s The Bear being a prime example) and others (Caitriona Balfe’s Inquiline) who are there mostly to give Charlie someone to talk to because a script has to be better-written than this one to pull off the “lone wolf” scenario.

Underneath all this mess is the potentially compelling story of the moral disintegration of a basically good man when confronted with an unspeakable loss. However, even that aspect is ultimately abandoned in favor of a less nihilistic approach – one that results in an anticlimactic resolution and a sappy denouement.

Having spent a good portion of his career on Mr. Robot, playing this sort of character is something Malek could probably do in his sleep, which is what seems to be happening. Charlie is a bland stereotype. Probably autistic (although this is never explicitly stated), he shows little emotion outside of the profound sadness that occasionally surfaces. It’s hard to excuse this type of characterization in an action/thriller where identification with the protagonist is mandatory. Added to that, even though there is a long roster of bad guys, none is especially frightening or intimidating. They all feel generic.

One reason I had some hope for The Amateur going in is that it is directed by James Hawes. Despite having only a single movie to his credit (2023’s One Life), Hawes is an accomplished TV director, with his signature project being the first season of Slow Horses. Alas, far too little of what made Slow Horses great has rubbed off on this movie. The choppy screenplay makes me curious about how badly Robert Littell’s source novel was mangled in translation. Regardless, this is yet another early 2025 movie where there’s just enough material in the film to assemble an intriguing three-minute trailer but not enough to make the other 120 minutes of more than passing interest.

Amateur, The (United States, 2025)