Charlie (Rami Malek) is a type of man that usually never gets to be an action hero. He’s nerdy coder or decrypter (or something) at the CIA, literally working in the basement of a federal building in a windowless room. A sweet quiet man, his home life with his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) is idyllic. They live in a restored farmhouse in rural Virginia, where he always makes her a carefully artisanal cup of coffee before she runs off on yet another business trip. Everything seems perfect until Sarah is killed in a terrorist attack in London.
There’s a horrible scene at the beginning of The Amateur where worker bee Charlie finds out about his wife’s death when he shows up at work, not having checked his phone. I’d imagine any workplace would handle it with more sensitivity, but Charlie’s bosses show the poor guy footage of Sarah being shot in the head, because, you know, it’s all over the internet. “We’ll handle it,” is the not-so-reassuring reassurance from his CIA bosses.
But because this is a movie, and because Charlie is a brilliant mind, and because it is all kind of nonsense, Charlie presents to his bosses within hours the identities of all the terrorists, and upon finding out that the CIA plans to take no immediate action, he proclaims he wants to be trained as a CIA operative immediately and go and kill them himself… or else. You see Charlie has been buddies with a deeply buried foreign operative who has uncovered corruption in the agency pointed directly at his bosses. And this movie-version of the CIA is still an agency where the top brass might actually care if they are busted. So they agree to train him.
The Amateur, at this point, starts to veer toward more ridiculous than actually engaging. Charlie seems to get a solid two days of training from a gruff but game agent (Laurence Fishburne), is given a handful of fake-identity passports, and schooled in the skills of MacGyvering bombs out of a toilet paper tube, some toothpaste, and floss. He slips away just as the CIA figures out his threat was a bluff, and in the way of movies, Charlie is suddenly in London, then Paris, then Istanbul, then hitching in the back of a truck in Romania. This is a man who it is clearly stated many times is not a traveler. But maybe he solved that problem by creating a transporter, for all I know.
This is one of those movies where Charlie travels with a small backpack and computer. If he loses all his stuff in a chase, he goes to a Romanian bodega, buys a new laptop, and is immediately hacked back into the secure CIA databases. Heck, I can’t even get my Windows password to work half the time. Charlie picks off the terrorists one by one using his nerdy moxie rather than a gun (it’s shown that he can’t shoot for shit, which is a little refreshing), but by the time he finally makes it to confront the main bad guy (Michael Stuhlbarg sporting one of those weird pan-Euro accents) on a ship off the Russian coast in the Baltic, The Amateur has long worn out its welcome.
I’m all for a tech nerd being the hero in a spy thriller, and Rami Malek is absolutely qualified to be that guy (after all, it was his role as a hacker on Mr. Robot that first shot him to fame). But man, I wish he had a smarter, better movie to work with. He and Fishburne have a nice chemistry, and if you manage to make it to the end of this two hour flick (which feels longer than it is), it’s clear that the filmmakers are setting this up as a potential franchise. But if there is an Amateur 2 coming, it will sorely need to improve on this one to keep me interested.
