"The Amateur" is the kind of movie we've been asking for.
A cerebral spy movie about the guys in the background.
Trailers dropped for this last year and I just assumed it was going to be another R-rated thriller loaded with brutal murders and some gratuitous sex scenes. Fortunately it takes a higher road and tells a great story in the process.
The Amateur is based on a 1981 novel by Robert Littell, about a dude who goes on a revenge bender, like The Terminal List only without the Navy SEAL training. Since the book was written during the Cold War and we now live in the post-GWOT era, some things had to be updated, and that’s fine. The real enemy is deep state subversives and their dark-site operators anyway.
The Plot
Charlie Heller is a coder for the CIA. His wife has some kind of job that requires her to travel every so often, it’s never really specified, but she has to go to London for a few days. While she’s there, a terror attack happens and she’s killed in the process. Extremely distraught by this, Charlie throws himself into his work and is able to find out the identities of the terrorists.
When he takes his findings to his superiors, he realizes they already know and they aren’t going to pursue these four guys because they want to take down the entire network. Charlie then reveals that he knows they’re doing illegal operations with terror networks and he blackmails the freaking CIA to train him to go after these guys.
From there the story is about Charlie hopping borders in Europe to hunt those who were responsible for his wife’s death, while the compromised officers in the CIA try to stop him before he exposes what they’ve done. The overall director of the CIA is trying to rein in the rogue chiefs under her, showing the hazards of a compartmentalized behemoth agency.
Cast and Characters
Rami Malek gained notoriety about ten years ago when he played the lead character on Mr. Robot, a TV show about a hacker. Here he plays Charlie, a programmer/coder who’s definitely on that autistic spectrum somewhere, and he really nails the little nuances of this performance. You feel what he’s feeling, you understand his limits when he fails, and you cheer him on when he succeeds. He’s not invincible, he just knows his weaknesses and plays to his strengths.
Rachel Brosnahan has had a heck of a run for the last several years. She led a show on Amazon called The Marvelous Ms. Maisel, which I’ve never seen but it ran for five seasons or something. She’s also playing Lois Lane in the upcoming Superman reboot. In The Amateur she plays Sarah Heller. I like the way she handled this character, and also how she was included in the script. This wasn’t just a throwaway female love interest, her presence was felt throughout the story, whether through flashbacks or else powerful emotional hallucinations by Charlie. Brosnahan really sold the role.
Laurence Fishburne plays Hendo, the colonel charged with training Charlie to operate in the field, and later to hunt him down. He does well as a mentor, and has every since he played Morpheus in The Matrix. He can also throw down in a fight scene and they give him one of those.
The only character that I felt was somewhat extraneous to the story was a CIA field operator named “The Bear,” played by Jon Bernthal. He had two scenes in the movie and was barely relevant, which sucks because Bernthal is awesome. I wonder if there isn’t a draft of this script that had more Bear in it. Still, he provides an important challenge for Charlie in the third act, and it was good to see him on screen.
The rest of the cast is mostly European actors I didn’t recognize. I appreciated that, it made the viewing less distracting. The villains were all great, very convincing, and very grounded. No monologues, no I expect you to die, Mister Bond speeches. There’s a showdown at the end between Charlie and the Big Bad, and they have a protracted exchange, but it’s just as much for the characters as it is for the plot, and it lands great.
The World
As far as the geopolitics go, nothing from Current Day was mentioned. The story takes Charlie from England to France to Spain to Turkey, and ultimately to Russia, but there weren’t any beefs about a Ukraine invasion or whatever. It’s our world without being tied directly to our time.
The only thing that got a wry half-grin and a cocked eyebrow out of me was the idea that the CIA director would hold any of her subordinates accountable for their crimes against humanity, which stands in stark contrast to how our deep state has handled anything at all to do with the Epstein files.
This is just a story. It’s how we would like things to be, not how they are.
Content
Surprisingly tame, considering how many bad guys get killed and such. It’s all in the middle range for PG-13, the most intense death was a woman getting hit by a van in the street. Language was at a minimum and there weren’t any sex scenes.
In fact, here’s where I want to highlight an element I appreciated: during his quest, Charlie meets a female contact who has been through a lot of similar things as he has, including being a widow, but since she’s Russian and has constantly been on the move in Turkey for the last several years, she’s extremely isolated.
They team up for a few days and they mesh together extremely well. At one point she wakes him up in the middle of the night and says bluntly that she’s not looking for sex, she just wants to sleep next to someone at night for a change; she knew she had found a kindred spirit and that he could uniquely understand that yearning, as they were both alone in the world.
The writers had an understanding of real love when they wrote that into the story. You almost never get that in films these days.
Why Watch It?
In short, this is a more real, more grounded version of the kind of story you get out of a Jason Bourne or a James Bond flick. Charlie isn’t a super spy whose brain was put in a blender by the CIA, and then got post-traumatic amnesia. He doesn’t travel the swanky parts of Europe on the government dime, winning poker games and sleeping with supermodels.
He’s in back alleys, in kitchens, in dive bars and cheap apartments. He has to set traps in warehouse and hang out around docks, inspecting beat-up equipment to make sure he knows the lay of the land. This is a cerebral flick that can move a little slow at times, but never stops to naval-gaze. There isn’t an epic car chase or insane stunts, just a relatable grind from a highly intelligent, highly driven character with a strong moral core and a willingness to get his hands dirty.
If It’s Still In Theaters…
Unfortunately after two weeks it hasn’t gotten a whole lot of buzz, and when I sat down for an 11PM showing on a Saturday night there were only six people in the theater, tops. It made back its production budget and it’ll probably get its marketing budget back with streaming deals and such, so it’ll be easy to find in the coming weeks and months.
But if you can still see it on a big screen I would recommend it. This is a great night out at the movies. I loved it.