The Amateur

This weekend, The Amateur, a new spy thriller starring Rami Malek, opens in theaters. The Amateur follows CIA codebreaker Charlie Heller as he blackmails his supervisors and goes on a mission of revenge after his wife is killed by a group of terrorists. This type of movie is right up my alley, so I was very interested to see how good it was.

The Amateur ended up being a pretty solid midlevel spy movie. The movie is a little different than your typical spy or revenge movie as it doesn't have a ton of action sequences but that doesn't make it any less thrilling. The movie embraces Charlie's skill sets in the technical field and doesn't randomly turn him into an action here. Every person he kills is done in a smart and technical way such as decompressing the air until a glass pool so the pool breaks instead of just using a gun to shoot someone. Instead of showcasing a James Bond-type character, this movie has the Q of the agency be the center of the story. You wouldn't expect Q to be going out and shooting a bunch of people and that isn't what happens here either. I also like the globetrotting aspect of the film, each character that Charlie is trying to kill takes him to a new place and just refreshes the setting a bit. I also like how The Amateur handles the idea of grief and what it does to people. Charlie has to go through the unimaginable loss of losing his wife and the movie keeps using his struggles as he continually thinks about his wife. I like how this movie doesn't go over the top with the action spy stuff. It isn't trying to be a big blockbuster. It just wants to tell a more grounded and calm spy story and I think it achieves that reasonably well.

I don't have a ton of issues with this movie. I felt that a few characters were a bit unnecessary, specifically the John Bernthal character. He is present at the beginning for a few minutes and then randomly shows up right before the 3rd act for no reason. Some ideas are implied in his conversation with Charlie but they are never explored and thus the character feels a bit wasted. I also felt that the plot was a bit episodic at times with each "episode" focusing on Charlie killing one of the four terrorists. The whole movie runs the same, he goes to a new city, tracks down one of the terrorists, encounters someone associated with the CIA, kills the terrorist, escapes, and then moves on to the next location to do the same thing over again. It feels a bit repetitive and probably could have been structured a little better.

Overall, this is a solid enough spy thriller. While it does have a few structural issues, the movie knows what it is going for, a B-level spy thriller, and achieves it reasonably well. You aren't going to get high action as that is not what this movie is but that is ok.

Score: 7.5/10 Grade: B Recommendation: Check it out if you are a fan of the spy genre