Rare is the film that makes you want more of that gritty, greasy feeling I personally associate with Tony Scott and those action-thrillers of the '00s, but The Amateur should have been done in that style. Written as a cheap, familiar plot meant as a star vehicle, the story concerns a CIA agent who embarks on a quest for revenge when his wife is killed in a terrorist attack. A remake, the film is also just not A-grade material; very few spy stories have that edge of novelty anymore. So an increase of style would make more sense in a film like this.
But style is one of the many elements lacking in this film. Its mostly blue-gray color palette invites torpor while its synth-heavy droning score never quite makes itself memorable. In fact, it's such a lackluster experience that I suspect the filmmakers had so much faith in the intrigue of the screenplay to make up for a lack of visual pizzazz. But the televised procedural realism of its aesthetics do nothing to distract from (or capitalize upon) the narrative doldrums in which we find ourselves. Unbelievable coincidence and giant leaps in logic pile up quickly, so we're never on the same page as the characters and we're being jerked along in obnoxiously predictable ways.
The star for this intended vehicle, Rami Malek, performs well here in the kind of role he has long since perfected. Awkward and jittery, yet appealing in his wide-eyed gaze, Charlie is a data analyst, and though he keeps himself healthy, you can't help but see a cave creature when you look at him, locked in a dark, sub-basement office surrounded by screens all the time. His personal life seems really lovely, and the film demonstrates the health of his marriage with startling economy, helped by an effortlessly winsome Rachel Brosnahan; it must be said, though, that her role as the "dead wife" plot device was so unabashedly tone-deaf right now that I had trouble swallowing it.
There's a strange subplot about Charlie's work environment that bears consideration: while mourning his wife and getting upset about the CIA's inaction in dealing with the sensitive situation, he discovers some unethical secrets about his superiors' use of drones and bombs. Taking this to his bosses, he blackmails them (including Julianne Nicholson) into getting him training as a field agent so that he can carry out revenge on his wife's killers. He gets assigned to Laurence Fishburne (there's a character name, but who cares? It's Laurence Fishburne) who does his duty before his trainee suddenly flees the country. The desk boy became Jason Bourne.
Well, sort of. I don't know for sure because I can't stand the Bourne movies. But Charlie does indeed enact vengeance over the remainder of the film, which overstays its welcome considerably. I suppose the agency having turned against him functions to increase Charlie's urgency as well as our sympathies for him. After all, he's a rogue agent for most of the film, and we're not given enough access to his interiority to otherwise have much sympathy. Malek's tortured visage and fearful rage in this film rarely come across as heroic but often as desperate and, oddly, smug. It's not a "wrong" or "bad" choice, and it arguably could work in a story like this, but it'd have to lean into a noir sensibility that isn't in this project. Similarly, the other big names in the film -- including a bizarre bit part from Jon Bernthal and an equally bizarre but far more disappointing cameo of sorts from Michael Stuhlbarg -- don't seem to know what they're doing and aren't treated with any interest by the camera.
Even as an action film, though, The Amateur fails to excite our attention. The fights are distractingly overedited and underlit, and chase scenes are no different. The screenplay can't decide where to focus or how to differentiate itself from the floodwaters of spy fiction. As a thriller, there are too many coincidences and too few stakes for us to be caught up in any real emotion. These uninspired choices aren't just a failure of taste; they're a failure of matching content with style. Apart from Malek's admirable work here, there is little in this film I'll ever want to revisit.
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