I’d been seeing trailers for The Amateur for a while now, and it did look very much like a standard thriller of its sort. That doesn’t mean it has to be bad. It just means I probably wouldn’t be too surprised about what happened during the course of the movie. However, putting actor Rami Malek in the lead sure did pique my interest a bit more than usual, and it is getting late enough in the year that I can expect the quality of the movie to be better than, say, anything that comes out in January or February. Someone decided The Amateur was worth seeing enough not to toss it out to theaters in the early months when bad or forgettable movies tend to come out.
I will admit, though, I was surprised by one thing: this is the second adaptation of the novel this story is based on to hit the big screen as there was another back in 1981.
Charlie Heller (Malek) is a timid, introverted computer analyst working for the CIA. He isn’t particularly bold, he doesn’t have many friends, and he’s about the least threatening guy in the entire building. What he does have going for him is he is deeply in love with his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), and he’s good with machines, codes, systems, and computers. Given enough time, he can figure out any puzzle. When Sarah heads off to a conference in London, Charlie passes on going with her as he just is far too timid to go overseas from the looks of things. But then things go wrong as terrorist types attack the hotel where Sarah is staying, she’s taken hostage while trying to help someone else escape, and she’s shot and killed in full view of the authorities by the leader of the three gunmen to get the cops to back off.
Naturally, Charlie wants to get his wife’s killers brought to justice, and he even uses his tech skills to figure out their identities and then pass it along to his superiors, none of whom seem all that surprised about who these men are. Charlie does have other things going for him, and he manages to convince his superiors to get him field agent training so he can find and kill these men himself. To that end, they send him to a trainer, Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne, doing his standard but effective tough guy mentor thing). This is all a ruse, though, as Charlie may know too much for the tastes of a corrupt superior, and he’s soon taking what he has learned and headed overseas on his own accord to find his wife’s killers. With Charlie doing things he’s not really temperamentally equipped to do, can he find the killers before the CIA finds him first?
As I said above, this is very much a standard thriller of its type, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Director James Hawes actually put the right amount of tension into the movie, and I actually dug the dour soundtrack. The story takes full advantage of Charlie’s skills. He may not be very good with a gun, but he can build a bomb with the best of them. Malek is fine, and Fishburne could play his own role effectively in his sleep, so no objections there. A bit more noteworthy were smaller turns from Jon Bernthal as a field agent that may be the closest Charlie has to a friend in the field, though he’s barely in the movie and could be removed without really losing anything, and there’s a really nice turn by Michael Stuhlbarg as one of the killers, this one with a more philosophical approach to life and what he does. I wasn’t expecting that sort of character to appear in a movie like this one.
That said, for all that the movie comes across as a standard if well-done thriller, the ending was something else entirely. The movie wraps things up with something that felt both anticlimactic and yet in-keeping with the character and themes as the movie had been presenting to me so far. It just wraps up a little too neatly with a character action or two that didn’t really fit into the story as it had been developed even if it was more or less faithful to what the movie had been saying about Charlie as a character the entire time. It was an ending that, honestly, I had no idea what to make of it. Make of that what you will.
Grade: B-
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