Nerdy Vengeance Will Be Rami Malek’s in ‘The Amateur’

Charlie Heller, the bereaved rookie vigilante Rami Malek plays in The Amateur, is all brains and no brawn. That sets him apart from his colleagues at the CIA, where he works as a cryptographer, running numbers while they run down suspects. It also distinguishes him, of course, from the Jason Bournes and James Bonds of the world — the perfect physical specimens that usually headline globe-hopping espionage claptrap of this sort. The Amateur takes off from a hooky hypothetical: What if the most intelligent man in central intelligence had to leave his desk and enter the field? For a sense of how that plays, imagine watching Q assume the mantle of 007.

It’s grief that pulls the lion out of this lamb. Charlie, you see, is after the terrorists who murdered his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), an investigative reporter in the wrong place at the wrong time. We know she’s doomed from the very first scene, a morning of coffee and canoodling so idyllic it can only portend tragedy. When the taxi peels out from their cozy farmhouse, Sarah smiling within, it’s like that carriage to eternity Emily Dickinson waxed poetic about. No domestic bliss this pure could possibly last. If it did, the hero would just stay home and cuddle instead of killing anyone.

Instead, Charlie blackmails two superiors into some combat training and takes the matter of avenging his beloved into his own shaky hands, chasing leads from London to Paris to Istanbul. A thousand Death Wish clones have treated revenge like a self-help seminar, transforming a meek beta into a macho alpha. But the fun of The Amateur lies in how un-stereotypically Charlie mans up: Rather than going full action hero, he remains his squirrelly, vaguely neurodivergent self — an IT guy turned vengeful wife guy, cutting an improvised warpath across Europe. Occasionally, this results in some mordant humor, as when Charlie cues up a YouTube explainer on lock-picking right at the door he means to enter. Other times, he’s less clueless than downright diabolical, rigging a skyscraper swimming pool into a cracking, collapsing death trap worthy of Jigsaw.

Back in his Mr. Robot comfort zone, Malek leans on all his old affectations of antisocial oddity: the bug eyes perennially averting, the face puckering so much you’d swear he was chomping on a lemon during every encounter. Is this our weirdest working movie star? There’s not an A-lister with a clammier brand. Less convincing are the scenes where this vaguely humanoid star-man has to express emotional anguish. No wonder the movie keeps cutting to nearly subliminal flashbacks of Brosnahan — an overcompensating attempt to fill the void where its heart should be. So relentlessly does The Amateur work the dead wife angle that you’d swear Christopher Nolan was responsible. (The script was, in fact, penned by Ken Nolan, no relation, and of relevantly military-minded Black Hawk Down fame.)

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What uniformly overqualified performers British TV director James Hawes has assembled around his fidgety lead. Laurence Fishburne puts a harsher, realpolitik spin on his Morpheus mentor routine to play the retired colonel who shows Charlie the ropes, then threatens to snuff him out at the command of the green agent’s peeved boss (Mindhunter’s exquisitely salty Holt McCallany, who makes his bastard bigwig hard to hate). Jon Bernthal, doing double duty this month in action flicks about possibly autistic ass-kickers, also swaggers in for a cameo as irresistible as it is totally expendable, even pointless. (You could cleanly excise his swinging-dick secret agent from the movie, but why would you want to?) And The Amateur is smart to conceal the identity of the big bad Charlie is tracking — all the better to delight us when the actor finally shows up to deliver a surprisingly sympathetic monologue, like the most understated Bond villain ever.

Only a hair overlong at two hours, this is the kind of disposable airport spy thriller that Hollywood rarely makes anymore, and which generally plays fine, maybe best, on cable over a lazy Saturday afternoon. The source material, a novel by Robert Littell, dates back to the Cold War, and only the technology meaningfully situates us in a more modern world. In fact, there’s even something rather retro about that element, too. The slow crawl of progress bars, the insect skitter of lines of codes, the jittery surveillance footage begging to be enhanced: If you’ve seen a Bourne movie or a Tony Scott techno-thriller, you know the paranoid drill.

Just don’t mistake the film’s vision of cloak and dagger for any kind of contemporary reality. The Amateur is a Cold War throwback in more ways than one: It reflects the spy movies, and the spycraft, of a very different era. Today, you wouldn’t need the mad hacking skills of Charlie Heller to declassify America’s shadiest operations. You’d just need a Signal account and a dream.