The Amateur
Rami Malek plays an introverted CIA analyst turned assassin in an overly convoluted remake.
The Revenger's Tragedy: Rami Malek
Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios.
As government agents go, Charlie Heller is not exactly cut from heroic cloth. However, he knows his way around a computer like a strand of spyware. In fact, his surveillance skills lead him to waters that he’d rather not have breached. It transpires that his seniors at Langley have been directly responsible for an unsanctioned and devastating overseas drone strike. When Charlie’s own beloved wife is executed in a terrorist attack in London, Charlie blackmails his superiors to train him as an international hitman so that he can exact his revenge on his wife’s killers…
So, the gist is that a mild-mannered geek outsmarts a nest of CIA departments in the name of love – or at least an agenda of revenge powered by his grief. Charlie beats himself up for not accompanying his wife to London, an excursion she thought he might enjoy. But Charlie is a reclusive, stay-at-home type and only in the name of revenge does he transform himself into a jet-setting assassin. It’s not an entirely plausible set-up, nor a complex one, so the film piles on a series of double feints and triple agents to keep things interesting. And of course it achieves the complete opposite as one scene cuts to the next with undue haste and lack of clarity.
Rami Malek is not a bad actor (he won an Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody), but he hardly generates the kind of screen presence to hold a big-budget thriller like this together. There is a cynical, aloof air to the proceedings which is something of a surprise as the director James Hawes brought so much character and humour to Apple TV’s award-winning Slow Horses, which also concerned itself with dubious government agencies. But then Hawes was working with an excellent script and actors of the calibre of Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas. Perhaps even odder is that this high-tech thriller, with its global facial recognition systems and deep source code configurations, is a remake of a 1981 film. In honour of the female lead of the latter, Marthe Keller pops up here in a cameo as a florist. Bless her.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson, Laurence Fishburne, Adrian Martinez, Danny Sapani, Jon Bernthal, Marc Rissmann, Joseph Millson, Marthe Keller.
Dir James Hawes, Pro Hutch Parker, Dan Wilson, Rami Malek and Joel B. Michaels, Screenplay Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, based on the 1981 novel by Robert Littell, Ph Martin Ruhe, Pro Des Maria Djurkovic, Ed Jonathan Amos, Music Volker Bertelmann, Costumes Suzie Harman, Dialect coaches Helen Simmons, Rick Lipton, Tim Monich and William Conacher.
Hutch Parker Entertainment-Walt Disney Studios.
122 mins. USA. 2024. UK and US Rel: 11 April 2025. Cert. 12A.
