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Rami Malek Plays to his Strengths in these Amateur Hours

Having never watched Mr. Robot, the show that launched the career of Rami Malek, I don’t think I’ve ever seen the actor fully in his aesthetic comfort zone; rather I’ve seen his sullen, disconnected performance style applied to a variety of contexts -sometimes to modest effect, sometimes to bad. But The Amateur is almost perfectly tailor-made for him, which is why it surprised me to learn it is actually based on a book from the 1980s that was made into a Canadian movie at that time as well. But writers Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, and director James Hawes ensure that their translation of it is adapted well to his sensibilities, so that he can anchor a film that might otherwise have no propulsion.
Because on its face, The Amateur is an incredibly generic premise, about a CIA programmer who enters the field covertly as an agent to take out the band of terrorists who killed his wife. About as boilerplate an espionage plot as you’re likely to get. And in a broad sense, the movie executes that plot successfully in a very boilerplate way. Malek though, in his groove, fits the typecasting here for a reason, while actually finding some compelling grounding within its limitations as well.
His cryptographer character Charlie Heller is everything you would expect of him -physically unimposing, soft-spoken, and socially awkward -his wife jokes about his inability to understand humour in a blisteringly Big Bang Theory sort of way. She is taken hostage by a quartet of terrorists in London and killed as they escape; a grieving, broken Charlie soon finding out exactly who they are and determining to take revenge -blackmailing his superiors into letting him with evidence of their politically motivated drone strikes. His globe-trotting vendetta is consequently coloured by the CIA’s efforts to apprehend him.
It’s certainly quaint now to see this movie’s illustration of CIA corruption behind closed doors, when exactly what they are doing here is happening in public view in the real world (to which nobody seems to care all that much). It’s especially notable given how Holt McCallany’s deputy director looks more than a touch like Pete Hegseth. And the tension around this does belie a sense of security norms and government values out of touch with the U.S. infrastructure as it operates (both now and, to a degree when it was filmed). But this sort of criticism that could now almost look idealistic is probably something we just need to get used to in terms of the American media self-image. Their relentless pursuit of Charlie, once he escapes their oversight clutches, feels far more realistic.
That intensity is drawn fairly well. Hawes is not much of a creative director, though he is experienced (he directed some of the best episodes of the early revived Doctor Who -though their direction isn’t particularly noteworthy). He does a fairly good job of emphasizing that air of surveillance -the feeling that at any moment Charlie could be spotted by one of the CIA’s agent cameras, rendering him and his mission both more claustrophobic and more isolated.
Of course this function is aided by Malek’s performance, which is intent and impassioned in spite of its limitations. To some degree, his ruthlessness feels artificial, especially in each situation where he corners his targets and finds creative ways to threaten their lives. His mathematical acuity and technical capabilities don’t often seem in line with the resources he has. But if his methods don’t translate, his humanity curiously does -and that hasn’t been something I’ve seen much from Malek, certainly not in a resonant way. The absence of his wife haunting him and his complete loss in imagining life without her manifesting in little snapshot visions of her appearing before him could be an easy way of giving Rachel Brosnahan a presence in this movie; but it is effective too in illustrating the devastation of this death on Charlie that Malek plays with believable sombreness wisely more often than rank emotion. This being the only course of action to his mind is understandable as well.
But what really sets Charlie’s goal and this movie itself to an extent apart from its generic cousins is its honesty about the act of killing. Laurence Fishburne plays Charlie’s trainer and then eventually his tailer through Europe, and while I don’t know if there’s any basis in reality to what he tells Charlie about the mindset to being a killer, but it carries forth well through the movie and isn’t forgotten. Malek clearly doesn’t stand out as any kind of tough guy spy and the approach of this film is to lean into that with consideration to how such a person might handle the requirements of his quest. Each death that he witnesses or is responsible for scars him a little, and you feel some semblance of its weight too. It darkens the soul and he is aware of it, and I respect the film for going to that place openly, especially in the final confrontation between Charlie and the terrorist ringleader, played by a surprising and always welcome Michael Stuhlbarg.
All that said, the movie doesn’t alter its approach to how it characterizes Charlie’s killings, with coolness and creativity. There is a mixed message to how it professes an ugliness to what he is doing on a purely moral level -equating him with the terrorists you might argue- while the tonal and visual framing of things like a decompressed rooftop pool and a rigged explosive in a crate emphasizes the traditional slickness of the genre. You’re meant to be wowed by the stunts at the same time the film asks you to reflect on them in a more dour way, and the film never reconciles this whiplash -especially by the end. The goons he picks off are just that -as much as their humanity rings on some level in his taking that away, it’s not apparent to the audience in a manner that buffets that point. And figures like Fishburne and Julianne Nicholson’s CIA director (as well as a random cameo from Jon Bernthal) don’t ultimately challenge that either. The one character who comes close is the widow of a former Russian agent, played by Catríona Balfe, who becomes a contact and ally for Charlie, but she isn’t given enough time to flesh it out.
Still, The Amateur is perfectly decent, and in even entertaining these themes is a little more interesting than your typical bland action thriller. Malek fits the part and finds some nuances in it, and though it comes off a little naive, its image of corruption in high levels of intelligence and a degree of consequence therein is a noble fantasy. That there’s little nobility elsewhere in the film is I think a stirring point.

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