For those who haven't seen him at his best, let one thing be made clear right out of the gate: Rami Malek is a great actor. Though he hasn't always been in the greatest of works since his breakout performance in the essential yet somehow still underrated series Mr. Robot, it's the ones that make the most of his unique screen presence where you can see his promise. Forget 2018's Bohemian Rhapsody, the rather woeful Freddie Mercury biopic in which Malek won an Oscar for his performance, and instead look at something like the bold 2016 film Buster's Mal Heart to get a sense of what he can do. In both that and Mr. Robot, he was nothing short of mesmerizing in how he captured each character's distinctly fragile state of mind as they faced down a world that seemed to be crumbling around them. It's these works where you can't take your eyes off him, as every piercing stare and tightly wound element of his physicality always brings an intensity that makes you sit up in your seat. Even as their stories may stumble, Malek never does.
This regrettably makes The Amateur — a largely well-acted though shaky adaptation of the novel of the same name by Robert Littell — such a disappointment. The blame falls not at the feet of Malek, who nearly holds the entire film together, but the increasingly awkward way it unfolds. It has the makings of a tense thriller yet repeatedly shoots itself in the foot even as it insists that what it is tapping into is something more complex. Instead, it's largely just contrived.
Centering on CIA decoder Charlie Heller (Malek) as he tries to get revenge on the mysterious mercenaries who killed his wife (Rachel Brosnahan of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) in London and find out the truth of the organization he's working for, it's like if Mr. Robot were crossed with the Jason Bourne series. You see, Charlie is kept in the dark about what's going on though he will have to learn how to be a spy in record time to take down his wife's killers one by one while uncovering the broader coverup at play.
Malek, who makes the role his own and is the biggest improvement over the similarly lackluster 1981 big screen adaptation of the book, is best in the moments of isolation as he has to piece this all together. He ensures that you feel a genuine sense of engagement as he takes on his bosses at the CIA and will soon have to evade his trainer (played by the similarly always great Laurence Fishburne in an otherwise thankless part) as he trots around the globe. The trouble is that the film, after a more tense confined confrontation with the first mercenary he finds, insists on going bigger and bigger to the point that any more grounded engagement is lost. Despite making an effective early joke of how Charlie is very much not James Bond, The Amateur clearly wants to be as brash as that series in a way that clashes with much of its setup. That it remains uncertain about what type of film it wants to be — a deconstruction of the tropes of the spy genre or one that revels in them — only means it succeeds at neither.
As we then follow his unlikely spy all over the world, with the occasional ghostly appearance by a wasted Brosnahan or what amounts to little more than a glorified cameo by Jon Bernthal, the mostly so-so action gives way to the movie bafflingly trying to reach for something more thoughtful about the nature of modern U.S. involvement in forever wars abroad. Without giving away the game, even as it's painfully obvious what is happening from the jump — it turns out the CIA is up to some underhanded dealings that Charlie will bring to the surface. It's something that the film seems to want to use to give the affair a bit more teeth, only to undercut this with a late monologue about how this corruption is only an outlier when the rest of their work is much more above board. If it wasn't such a bizarre cop-out, it would be comical in how tacked-on this feels. Where Mr. Robot was an honest confrontation with the forces consuming the world and gave Malek more to work with, The Amateur is a mission failure on both counts.
The Amateur
Rated R
Directed by James Hawes
Starring Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Laurence Fishburne
