Earlier this year, Steven Soderbergh and David Koepp thrilled us with Black Bag, a clever and sexy espionage thriller that put a married couple at the center of its secrets and scheming. Now comes the funhouse mirror version of that: The Amateur. On a very superficial level, both movies are about spies and marriage. But one is sophisticated, playing with genre expectations to surprise the audience while exploring the depths of marital intimacy and trust. The other is The Amateur, a frustratingly old-school thriller in which the most modern element is not the top-notch computer hacking that's crucial to its plotline, but focusing its story of a "wife guy."
Academy Award–winner Rami Malek stars as wife guy Charlie Heller, who, when he's not fawning over his beautiful, chatty, cheerful spouse, Sarah (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel's Rachel Brosnahan), works for the CIA in their decryption and analysis sector. An introverted computer nerd, Charlie doesn't have much in the way of friends, unless you count his mysterious online buddy Inquiline, who sends him super top-secret info about CIA cover-ups. When Sarah dies in a hostage situation, Charlie is utterly alone. So what does he do? Well, he blackmails his corrupt CIA bosses into training him in the ways of espionage, so he can track down those who killed his wife and exact a brutal revenge.
If this premise sounds familiar, it might be because The Amateur is based on the 1981 Robert Littell novel of the same name, or because that book was adapted into a movie that same year. Or maybe it's because the very conceit of "man shows he loves woman by exacting revenge" is such a cliché that we have a term for how it treats these female characters, who exist purely to die and give the man in their life a reason to have feelings. It's called "fridging." And even though Brosnahan has a dazzling screen presence and a Primetime Emmy, her role in The Amateur is to be charming and then tragically killed.
Where Black Bag broke the rules of spy movies and married couples being boring, The Amateur flings audiences back into the tedious and maudlin tale of a man who will literally plot a globe-trekking assassination vacation instead of going to therapy.
The Amateur taps into a boring vein of toxic masculinity.
As soon as Charlie arrives at the CIA offices, screenwriters Gary Spinelli and Ken Nolan set him apart from the ultra-macho men who work as agents: Where Charlie is scrawny, nervous, and soft-spoken, The Bear (Jon Bernthal of the unrelated TV show The Bear), is muscular, confident, and has bravado. CIA director Moore (Holt McCallany) is likewise a human brick wall, speaking with a low, harsh efficiency, even when giving condolences. So when Charlie uses his very special set of computer engineering skills to push his bosses into training him to shoot, evade, and generally be a spy, that's meant to be very fish out of water. But Malek played this game 10 years back in the TV drama Mr. Robot, so the supposed contrast isn't all that compelling.
Under the mentoring of Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), Charlie not only learns how to fire a gun, but also realizes that's not going to be the best way for him to end the quartet who killed his wife. Instead, he'll use his much-touted brain to come up with ludicrously complicated methods to murder, exploiting allergies, a rooftop pool, and vanity to his own ends. But while this vengeance is inventive, it's not amusing or fun. It's grim.
Rather than coping with his wife's death, he's pitched himself into some twisted quest to avenge her, never stopping to consider what she might have wanted for him. But hey, to his credit, she only exists to give him a plotline. And per everything else about this movie, he only exists to obsess unhealthily over her. He has no life outside of his job and his wife, so with her gone, he thrusts his identity into the former, making himself over to be as Bear-like as he can imagine. Unspoken is the idea that, if he can be a real man and kill off all these enemies, he'll be better — and like the untouchable, deep-voiced macho men who make him feel inferior, who can storm into any room with a gun and take whatever they want.
That this is exactly the kind of man who killed his wife is not something touched on until the climax, and then, it’s not done in such a way as to satisfy. While a monologue from critically beloved character actor Michael Stulhberg (Call My by Your Name) draws a line between this amateur and the terrorists he loathes, the movie itself refuses to confront the consequences of Charlie’s quest. His reckless mission leads to untold collateral damage and traumatizing countless civilians, plus the death of an ally. And yet, the movie won't take a single beat to allow these tragedies to sink it. Why? Because wife guy gonna wife guy?
The Amateur makes little use of its best assets: its ensemble cast.
Malek, performing a blend of his characters from Mr. Robot and the horror video game Until Dawn (not to be confused with the upcoming movie of Until Dawn), is frantic but frankly boring as the rogue vigilante. Fishburne's appearance offers promise, potentially proving a coolly sage foil to the unmoored hero, as he did in The Matrix. But while the third act behaves as if Henderson and Charlie had plenty of time to become unexpected buddies, their actual time together is short and unsatisfying.
Likewise, Brosnahan is given little to do but be winsome while wifing. With the exception of the hostage sequence, her scenes could be used for any Folgers' ad about a couple who finds the time to connect amid a hectic work life. Bernthal brings the same chaotic swagger to The Bear that he does to The Bear and The Accountant 2. It's enough to prop up a thinly drawn character meant to inspire envy, if nothing else.
Julianne Nicholson is stranded with a handful of scenes as the upright CIA head who wants to flush out corruption, while McCallany grimaces his way through as her obstacle. Caitríona Balfe is intriguing as a fellow hacker but gets sidelined as soon as her story begins to deepen. Stulhbarg has this movie's equivalent of the Bond villain speech and delivers it with chilling effect. But adrift in tired cliches of what it means to be a man, The Amateur feels like a relic of 1981, despite its updated tech and wife-guy tweaking. It's got the depth of a shot glass.
Director James Hawes (One Life, Black Mirror: "Hated in the Nation") may have been challenged by the dusty material of a 40-year-old novel. He might have relied on the talents of an extraordinary cast. But his vision of a blue-gray world brings nothing enthralling to The Amateur. By contrast, the action scenes that should feel like bittersweet victories are bursting with color: vibrant yellows, blues, and oranges. Perhaps this is meant to urge us to relish these deaths, hard-won by our hero. But instead, they undercut the movie's moral question, which asks, if Charlie embraces violence, is he any better than those who killed his wife?
In the end, The Amateur has no real interest in this, providing a resolution that is not only unfulfilling but almost comically out of touch in a way that is Hollywood at its worst.
