Click here for the flashback interview with director James Hawes for ONE LIFE.
We’ve been here before. The original iteration of THE AMATEUR hit cinemas in 1981 when the Soviet Union was menacing the peace and security of the world. In the 2025 iteration, set in the present day, has had to find another menace and terrorists are not only the suitable choice, they somehow make the old days of the Cold War seem like the good old days when the enemy was so willingly public. This nifty update has seamlessly integrated the current paranoia into a script that is satisfying, nimble, and surprising. Even if you know the original.
Rami Malek stars as Charlie Heller, a nebbishy CIA cryptographer living his dream cracking code for the agency and enjoying connubial bliss in a rural farmhouse with wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan). With an IQ of over 170, he has a hard time fitting in, even with the other agency cryptographers, but Sarah loves his quirky buttoned-down persona and puppy-dog adoration. And, so, when a terrorist attack kills her during a business trip to London, something in Charlie snaps. Instead of using his tech whiz-ness to track down her murderers, which he does in the first 15 minutes or so of the film, he wants to go into the field and kill them himself. Being a smart guy, he doesn’t just put in a request with his boss, SAC Director Moore (Holt McCallany), he blackmails him with the sensitive information he’s gleaned from a longtime anonymous contact. The foolproof blackmail scheme may impress Moore, and even Col. Henderson (Lawrence Fishburne) tasked with training him for the field, but his lack of a killer instinct, and impressively bad marksmanship lead Henderson to give Charlie a single-digit percentage of success. And that’s being generous.
Charlie may not be the ideal CIA agent, but in the course of the film he proves over and over again the shortcomings of the agency’s narrow definition of competence. As someone who knows exactly how many CCTV cameras there are in London, he is the guy who concocts ingenious methods for tracking down the killers and then coercing them into cooperating with him. I mean, weaponizing a swimming pool, and the hard way at that. Malek is perfection as the nerd on a mission. He has no swagger, no poise. Instead, he balances Charlie’s lack of innate talent with an all-consuming impulse to get even, and makes a gift for solving puzzles breathtaking. All the while, being haunted by images of his dead wife in the present, creating an emotional statis as he sees her sitting in their kitchen, telling him he needs some sleep that then fuels that impulse.
As for the narrative, it is intelligently written to allow us to absorb the twists that we don’t see coming, and that are all the more enjoyable for playing fair with the spectators as well as being so darned clever. Sure, it has all the best genre tropes, with Charlie finding himself being hunted by a rogue element in the agency as well as the perpetrators when they catch on to him, but it’s a slickly realized framework for a film that values smarts over action. That includes an unexpected ally in the person of an embittered widow (Caitríona Balfe) who, conveniently, has the computer set-up to keep an eye on Charlie’s pursuers from all sides, and guide him away from them during chases, one of which weaponizes large appliances. Not to mention the prime villain, played with sanguine assurance by Michael Stuhlbarg, who leads us with an almost Socratic method through realpolitiks and the fallout of hubris in the spy game. And life in general.
THE AMATEUR considers the toll of revenge on the seeker and gives us an alternate definition of integrity as it sweeps us along. Well-constructed and precisely paced, it is the epitome of what a spy film should be without resorting to bells, whistles, or CGI chase sequences. No, what we have here is a sweaty guy out of his depth finding a way to use his particular skill set to show the professionals who is boss. How great is that?
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