Rami Malek in a scene from The Amateur.John Wilson/Supplied
- The Amateur
- Directed by James Hawes
- Written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, based on the book by Robert Littell
- Starring Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan and Laurence Fishburne
- Classification PG; 123 minutes
- Opens in theatres April 11
Critic’s Pick
A real “they-don’t-make-’em-like-this-any-more” flick, the new/old espionage thriller The Amateur is the kind of highly enjoyable but thoroughly ludicrous three-star movie that studios used to pump out with gusto in the mid-’90s. There are no franchise ambitions, no high-concept hooks and the only intellectual property being exploited is a mostly forgotten 1981 spy novel by Robert Littell, which itself was adapted into an even more memory-holed Canadian film featuring Christopher Plummer and co-produced by Garth Drabinsky. (Drabinsky’s name is absent from this new Disney-funded adaptation, though his former producing partner Joel B. Michaels gets a top-billed credit.)
A significant step up in star power and resources from its Canadian predecessor, director James Hawes’s new film might be best elevator-pitched today as Mr. Robot meets Jason Bourne, with a tiny gore-free dash of Saw. Just outside of Langley, Va., the mild-mannered and vaguely autistic tech wiz Charles (Rami Malek) lives a comfortable life with his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan). During the day, Charles is a crack cryptographer for the CIA, working in a windowless office with his fellow data-crunchers. During the evenings, he’s mostly doting around Sarah, who is either a lawyer, business executive or someone else whose vaguely described profession involves a lot of international travel to conferences. The details don’t matter much because very quickly, Charles’s world is shattered when Sarah is killed during a terrorist attack in London.
Lost in grief and fuelled by revenge, Charles essentially blackmails his CIA bosses – including a wonderfully bulldog company man played by Holt McCallany (The Iron Claw) – into training him as a field agent so that he can hunt Sarah’s killers down himself. After connecting with a tough-love former commando (Laurence Fishburne, doing his best real-world Morpheus), Charles embarks on a globe-trotting vigilante quest, albeit one in which the hunter is more versed in math than manhunts.
Laurence Fishburne does his best real-world Morpheus as a tough-love former commando in the film.John Wilson/Supplied
If this all sounds absurd – including Charles using Rube Goldberg-style traps to ensnare his targets – that’s because it absolutely is, every single second. Yet Hawes, whose background is more rooted in British television (Slow Horses, Doctor Who, Black Mirror) than Hollywood film, handles all the illogical turns with a deeply sincere appreciation of genre mechanics. He knows that when, say, Charles manages to easily escape a CIA black site or rig a hotel’s swimming pool with a glass-pressurization device, that there is no single shred of reality to the proceedings. That doesn’t mean that the film cannot have fun with such leaps of logic, while at the same time not slathering the proceedings with a layer of detached irony. It is respectful and smooth filmmaking that never loses sight of its one and only goal: keeping its audience hooked.
It helps that Hawes has assembled an ace cast of familiar faces. Not only do McCallany and Fishburne pull off ice-cold character-actor work, but the film also squeezes in valuable time for Jon Bernthal as a rough-and-tumble CIA operative, Julianne Nicholson as the agency’s new no-nonsense chief and Michael Stuhlbarg as a bizarrely but amusingly accented terrorist. And as the amateur 007 with an IQ of 170, Malek pulls off just the right mix of nervy and nerdy, even if the script never gives Charles much time to reckon with the moral weight of his newfound lust for blood. (The actor also doesn’t share quite enough chemistry with Brosnahan to believably cement their ride-or-die marriage, but that could also simply be a byproduct of what happens when you don’t colour in a character beyond her first name.)
Watching The Amateur confidently unfold – with Charles racking up frequent flyer miles almost as much as his body count – the movie reveals itself to be a tiny little theatrical miracle in this streaming-dominant era. It is not quite clear how it exactly happened, but this low-stakes/high-energy movie feels like just the kind of production that a studio like Disney (produced through its 20th Century Studios label) would normally punt straight to Hulu. Hopefully the film’s theatrical-first release signals a new kind of thinking inside Hollywood, and not just a false-flag operation. The movies need more professionals like The Amateur.
