April 14, 2025 · Watch the official trailer
With the frequency and similarity of the action movie genre, it seems inevitable that derivative comparisons can be made about almost any pseudo-blockbuster action flick that hits the big screen these days.
Any number of Jason Statham films can be layered on top of one another to highlight the pattern, for example, his recent film “A Working Man” could be simply classified as last year's “The Beekeeper” mixed with “Taken.
Oscar winner Rami Malek, best known for playing the title character in television’s “Mr. Robot” and Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody takes his first major steps as a leading man into an action film franchise with “The Amateur.”
This somewhat paint by numbers espionage film could be categorized as “Jason Bourne” meets “John Wick” with an introverted lead, though one could dumb it down even further and say that Malek’s character Charlie Heller is nothing but a keyboard warrior or “John Click.”
Based on the 1981 novel by Robert Littell, “The Amateur” follows Charlie, a CIA analyst whose wife was assassinated in a terrorist event and seeks to get revenge on her killers by receiving counterintelligence training in order to hunt them down for some eye for an eye vengeance.
Structurally, the film highly evokes 2017’s “American Assassin” with Dylan O'Brien, though that film is far more brutal and straightforward, whereas “The Amateur” is exceptionally cerebral and nuanced in its character work.
Director James Hawes pulls broadly from the world of Bourne to give Malek a wide tapestry of emotions with which to bring audiences into Charlie's psyche as he struggles to honor his wife's memory while seeking vengeance for her death.
At times, Malek is almost a less assured version of Matt Damon’s Jason Bourne character striding across Europe with an almost identical wardrobe meant to get made to give viewers the illusion of comparison although the lack of hand-to-hand combat and frenetic pace in “The Amateur” may prove to disengage some more casual audiences wanting to see a more brutal “John Wick” like action sequence.
The film plays heavily into Malek’s strengths and character work lingering on unexpected moments where Malek's face is able to portray both a haunting melancholy as well as understandable fear of the unknown with a cruel cerebral self-assuredness. This is expertly layered within each scene, making Charlie one of the more compelling characters to be in popcorn action film in sometime.
There are incredibly talented character actors littered across “The Amateur” though their use and utility with the film is not evenly dispersed.
Largely seen in flashbacks, Rachel Brosnahan’s character Sarah does have solid chemistry with Malek’s Charlie and moments sprinkled across the film do raise the emotional stakes, though there's not enough to Brosnahan's character to give her any agency within the film.
Stalwarts like Holt McCallany and Lawrence Fishburne provide gravitas to their work as senior CIA intelligence officers that pushback on Charlie's overall agenda, though the somewhat bizarre inclusion of Jon Bernthal as a field operative friendly with Charlie doesn't really seem to fit within the larger context of the film and it feels as if there is a significant subplot left on the cutting room form.
As is frequently the case, Michael Stuhlbarg comes in for a small handful of scenes and absolutely steals the show with instantly gripping monologues that capture the audience's attention and draw viewers deeper into scenes that shouldn't really matter as much as they do. His inclusion here is an exceptional bit of casting that is the kind of thing that award shows should be celebrating as supporting work rather than co-leads.
Visually, it's hard to watch “The Amateur” without thinking of any number of action franchises that Hawes clearly pays homage to, most notably the visual iconography of jet setting spy films like the Jason Bourne and James Bond franchises.
Action sequences in the film are engaging and at times enveloping to the viewer, though the lack of physicality in much of the film makes “The Amateur” feel far more like a spy film than an assassin movie.
While there are numerous action films arriving in theaters with both “A Working Man” and “The Accountant 2” also debuting in April, there's not enough in “The Amateur” to make it more compelling for cinephiles to seek out theatrically than either of competitors, though audiences intrigued by the film’s overall premise and star studded ensemble cast may find a trip to theaters to see “The Amateur” well worth their time.
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