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James Mottram

2/5 stars
Rami Malek shone in Mr. Robot, his breakout TV drama about cybersecurity and hackers, and it seems that ever since, he has been seeking something similar.
James Bond movie No Time to Die, in which he played the villain, was very much a case of the spy who bored me. And now The Amateur, adapted from a novel by Robert Littell, crosses the same terrain.
Malek plays Charles Heller, a CIA cryptographer working at Langley, Virginia. When his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered in a terrorist attack in London, the distraught Charlie has only one thing on his mind: revenge.


Confronting his bosses, he demands mission-specific training. To shut him up, they agree, putting him with Laurence Fishburne’s Colonel Henderson, who soon realises that Charlie does not have the mettle to be a cold-blooded killer.
Undeterred, Charlie sets about using the skills he does have, tracking down the four people involved in Sarah’s death, starting in Paris. It is almost like watching the polar opposite of Liam Neeson’s Taken character chase down the bad guys.
It is an intriguing premise, one that Malek is well suited to deliver. But that is where the good things about The Amateur end.
The muddled, conspiracy-laden plot, one that sees high-ranking CIA officials embroiled in off-the-books black-ops missions, swiftly unravels.

Characters become disposable, like Jon Bernthal’s agent, who turns up in the most improbable location and then disappears.
Similarly Fishburne’s military man is more plot cog than anything substantial; it is a film undeserving of his gravitas.
Although there is good work from Belfast’s Caitriona Balfe as a contact Charlie fosters, especially a touching scene where she craves intimacy following the loss of her husband, this is a film that relies on Malek to pull you through.
To his credit, there is something very watchable about him as the CIA analyst forced to go rogue for vengeance. It is just a pity the script wasn’t given a further polish.
Director James Hawes (One Life) desperately wants to hark back to 1970s Hollywood conspiracy thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, but never manages to.

There are some killer set pieces, one involving a glass-bottomed, rooftop swimming pool in a Madrid hotel – a scene that is far too spoiled in the film’s trailer. But it’s never enough to knit this into a satisfying whole.
It would be unfair to call this enterprise the work of amateurs; there is too much craft and care involved. But this could have been so much better.
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This story of a CIA analyst looking for vengeance has all the elements necessary for success, but somehow fails to pull them together


This story of a CIA analyst looking for vengeance has all the elements necessary for success, but somehow fails to pull them together.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}This story of a CIA analyst looking for vengeance has all the elements necessary for success, but somehow fails to pull them together

This story of a CIA analyst looking for vengeance has all the elements necessary for success, but somehow fails to pull them together