Reviewed by Jeffrey Sanzel
Revenge is a favored plot devices of the thriller genre. Studios release dozens, if not hundreds, of films each year, drawing from this seemingly endless well. Cinema is populated with tales of the average (usually) man retaliating for the abduction or death of a loved one (spouse/parent/child). The hero, discovering new-found or dormant resources, overcomes evil, destroys their opponents, and allows the audience a vicarious sense of justice.
Robert Littell worked for many years as a Newsweek journalist during the Cold War, serving as the magazine’s foreign correspondent from 1965 to 1970. Beginning with The Defection of A.J. Lewinter (1973), the award-winning Littell wrote over twenty spy novels, many concerning the CIA and the Soviet Union, the most recent A Plague on Both Your Houses: A Novel in the Shadow of the Russian Mafia (2024).
With Diana Maddox, Littell co-adapted The Amateur (1981) for the screen, starring John Savage and Christopher Plummer. Director James Hawes helms the current remake, with a screenplay by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli. Taking the novel’s basic story but eschewing many of the more interesting details, they have fashioned a by-the-numbers thriller that, for all its drive, never builds momentum.
Low-key (almost somnambulic) Charles Heller (Rami Malek) works as a CIA cryptographer. His wife, professional photographer Sarah Horowitz (Rachel Brosnahan), travels to London on business. She is taken hostage and murdered during an illegal arms deal gone wrong.
Grief-stricken, Heller decides to kill the four terrorists. Leveraging information he uncovered about a drone strike cover-up, he blackmails Special Activities Center Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany) for information. Furious but cornered, Moore buys time by sending Heller for training with Colonel Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne). Once in Europe, Heller methodically hunts down his wife’s killers. He teams up briefly with an anonymous source, Inquiline (Caitriona Balfe), but most of his work is done solo, with Heller harnessing his genius rather than his limited physical skills.
The film travels from Paris to Marseilles, Istanbul to Madrid, and finally Constanta (Romania) to the Baltic Sea, where the climax is a low-grade confrontation between Heller and the mastermind, Horst Schiller (Michael Stuhlbarg).
While The Amateur contains little original, the novel touched on a few insightful pieces, particularly connections to the Holocaust. With the story updated to the present, these aspects and one of the most interesting characters, a shadowy figure known as the Professor, have been eliminated. Even Heller’s fascination with the identity of the author of Shakespeare’s plays is absent, leaving Heller a one-note character.
If anything, the film highlights technological change, with a world run by computers and monitored in every corner by thousands of cameras. However, these devices have become central rather than tools for telling the story.
Rami Malek rose to prominence with the USA Network’s Mr. Robot, for which he received an Emmy for Lead Actor in a Drama Series. His big-screen work included the Night at the Museum trilogy, Larry Crowne, The Master, and Need for Speed. But his breakout came with his Oscar-winning performance as Queen’s singer-songwriter, Freddie Mercury, in the biopic Bohemian Rhapsody.
Malek is unquestionably an unusual and gifted actor, capable of complexity, variety, and style. But his performance as Heller is so subdued as not to register. Except for one beautiful moment when he opens Sarah’s suitcase, he seems to play Heller without a heartbeat. For Malek, The Amateur will be remembered as an in-between film, a bland undertaking contrasting with better and more textured work.
Brosnahan is relegated to two short scenes, a handful of flashbacks, and a couple of “visions” that do little to show her range or talent. The always watchable Fishburne barely appears; there is a sense that he was shot for expediency, getting his scenes filmed in as few days as possible.
Balfe is fine as Inquiline but saddled with sharing her history rather than revealing character through action (and the screenplay does her no favors, ignoring the more complicated background introduced in the book). McCallany does the best he can with a stock political villain. It is left to Jon Bernthal, as an operative known as “The Bear,” to provide an off-beat glimmer.
Unfortunately, The Amateur offers no growth and certainly no catharsis. The resolution lacks a final of energy or surprising revelations.
The final ten minutes wrap up the big picture, followed by a vaguely uncomfortable exchange meant to be humorous, ending with a simplistic final image unsubtly telegraphed earlier.
For two hours, everything happens, and nothing happens. The constant movement possesses motivation but no sense of internal purpose. The film is both literally and figuratively bloodless. In the end, The Amateur provides a generic espionage drama with perpetual action but little intrigue.
Rated PG-13, the film is now playing in local theaters.
Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way is a feature-length documentary about the life of the trailblazing woman who made history in 1984 as the first female Vice Presidential nominee on a major national party Presidential ticket.
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