The Amateur review: cold fish Charlie fails to take us with him in disappointing spy thriller

Anyone who goes to spy films seeking vicarious thrills has to admit that it is something of a stretch to imagine ourselves as a dashing James Bond or daredevil Jason Bourne. But Rami Malek's Charlie Heller in The Amateur is possibly a more easily identifiable stand-in for us, the armchair heroes in the audience, even if he does have an IQ of over 170.

Charlie is an introverted, glasses-wearing desk jockey in the Decryption and Analysis section at the CIA’s Langley headquarters. "Just a nerdy feller who works on computers," is how one of the film’s other characters dismisses him. He is so much of a cautious stick-in-the-mud that he won’t even accompany his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), when she takes a business trip to London.

But everything changes for him when Sarah is tragically killed in a terrorist attack in the city and the CIA reveals itself reluctant to pursue the perpetrators, forcing Charlie to blackmail his superiors into giving him the mission training to enable him to track down and kill them himself. He wants to look his wife’s murderers in the eyes and "balance the scales".

Ah, surely just a spot of instruction from Laurence Fisburne’s seasoned CIA veteran, Henderson, will be what it takes to turn Charlie (and by extension us) into a kick-ass field agent? Er, no. A session in the shooting range quickly shows that the puny Charlie can’t shoot to save his life. He would be hard pressed to hit a barn door from ten yards.

"I can’t make you into something you’re not," Henderson tells him. "You're not a killer." Henderson’s boss is even more dismissive of Charlie: "I don’t think you could beat a 90-year-old nun in an arm wrestling match."

But Charlie does have that genius IQ to fall back on. So, using his tech wizardry, he gives his CIA handlers the slip and sets off for Europe to hunt down the four people responsible for his wife’s death. Unfortunately, he doesn’t just have this lethal quartet to deal with. The CIA’s supremely dodgy Deputy Director (Holt McCallany) wants to keep a lid on the covert black ops he’s been running out of the agency and, unbeknownst to his new straight-arrow chief (Julianne Nicholson), issues the order to have Charlie killed.

For fans of the spy thriller genre, The Amateur boasts promising ingredients. Malek’s star-making role as the computer-hacker protagonist of Mr Robot makes him a good fit for the film’s hero, while director James Hawes demonstrated his espionage chops by helming the brilliant first series of Slow Horses. Fishburne is no lightweight, either, when it comes to purveying ambivalent menace. Yet the finished film still counts as a disappointment.

The Amateur is a remake of a 1981 Canadian film, which was based on a novel by American spy writer Robert Littell and starred John Heard, Christopher Plummer and Marthe Keller. (Incidentally, Keller also appears in the present film, although I have to admit that I only spotted her name in the end credits and didn’t notice her in the film itself.)

Back in 1981 the Cold War was still in progress, yet with its revenge-seeking hero the plot of the original The Amateur appeared to owe less to the espionage genre than to the cycle of vigilante thrillers started by 1974’s repellent Death Wish, which featured Charles Bronson as a similarly mild-mannered husband driven to violence by his wife’s murder. Times have changed - although today’s geopolitics are admittedly every bit as scary as they were in the 1970s and early 1980s — and Charlie’s mission of cold-blooded vengeance can’t help but make us uneasy now.

As viewers, we might have been able to overcome our qualms if we felt the full weight of Charlie’s loss, but he and his wife have barely exchanged a couple of “love yous” before she leaves for London and gets killed. Had Charlie and Sarah’s relationship had been more fleshed out at the start, we may have been more invested in him and his mission.

As for Charlie’s mission itself, it is arguably no more far-fetched than most other spy films. And, as the finer examples of the genre have shown, when the characters are engaging and the story is gripping we can forgive the most implausible of plots. It’s when these features are missing that we tend to dwell on improbabilities.

Here Charlie gets into peril often enough and, when the action arrives, it proves reasonably exciting, but Hawes fails to sustain the tension in between and Malek’s hero remains something of a cold fish throughout. The result is that we can’t help questioning how Charlie manages to move so easily from one country to another as he passes between Paris, Madrid, Istanbul and a port on Russia’s Baltic coast, how he manages to get so close to his targets, and how he manages to evade his CIA pursuers.

The lack of tension also meant that I couldn’t prevent my attention from straying to thoughts of other movies. Charlie’s situation reminded me of the plight of Robert Redford’s desk-bound CIA analyst in director Sydney Pollack’s 1975 film Three Days of the Condor, a classic example of the paranoid political thrillers of the Watergate era.

Another hero with no prior experience in the field and few others to trust, Redford’s protagonist uses his book-smart wits to evade both assassins for hire and rogue elements within the CIA. Like Charlie, he too has lost a loved one to a gunman’s bullet, but his subsequent actions are never driven by revenge. His first motive is to stay alive; his second is to expose his agency's murderous wrongdoing.

While watching The Amateur, my thoughts also wandered to a more recent film, 2020’s similarly globetrotting action thriller The Rhythm Section, which cast Blake Lively as a woman seeking payback for the deaths of her whole family in a terrorist airplane bombing. Again like Charlie, Lively’s heroine gets training from an expert spy — in her case Jude Law’s rogue ex-MI6 agent — and doesn’t immediately turn into an ultra-cool hit woman. She’s fumbling and petrified when she goes into action. For sure, the plot of The Rhythm Section doesn’t stack up, but director Reed Morano gave the action scenes that real sense of sweat, adrenaline and blurry panic I found missing from the exploits of Malek’s Charlie.

If The Amateur had made me feel the clammy fear conveyed by these other films, I would have liked it a whole lot more.

The Amateur is set to premiere exclusively in movie theaters worldwide on Friday, April 11, 2025. See what else is coming out with our full 2025 new movie release schedule.