For about 20 minutes, “The Amateur” is pretty exciting: It’s glossy, it’s beautifully cast, and it boasts an intriguing premise. Charlie Heller (Rami Malek), a C.I.A. cryptographer — the movie informs us right off the bat that he has a “big brain” — bids his beloved wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), goodbye as she’s off to London for business. Arriving at work, he receives a batch of highly secretive encoded files from a long-running anonymous source, and when he cracks them open he realizes they reveal a series of rogue operations all over the world, ordered by some high-ranking official at the agency, that resulted in civilian deaths. And then, he receives word that Sarah has been killed in an attack at her hotel in London.
Solid setup. But though Charlie commences globe-trotting in search of revenge, the movie somehow feels like it’s treading water, going nowhere at all. He concocts an elaborate plot to force the misbehaving C.I.A. bosses into giving him some training in various agent-like activities (shooting, fighting, making improvised explosive devices), which they do, under the tutelage of the gruff Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne). Then, before the bosses catch onto his true plan, he takes off with agents on his tail. It’s a classic case of This Guy Knows Too Much and Must Be Eliminated.
“The Amateur” — based on Robert Littell’s 1981 novel, also adapted for a 1982 film — is shaped like a jet-setting vigilante spy flick, served alongside a heaping dose of conspiracy thriller. Those genres tend to overlap well, given their penchant for overly complicated plots, futuristic tech gadgets and a deep sense of paranoia. This one has some of the other hallmarks, too — the dead wife, the mysterious informant, the chases through foreign streets. Working with the cinematographer Martin Ruhe, the director James Hawes serves up the kind of images that seem full of meaning and menace, which is what you want from this kind of movie. Malek underplays Charlie — not the kind of guy you normally find at the center of a spy movie — which means his moments of true emotion feel suitably poignant. And Jon Bernthal, Catriona Balfe, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson and Michael Stuhlbarg round out an excellent cast.
But there is, to put it colloquially, just no there there. I get that “The Amateur” isn’t interested in Bond-style comedy, opting instead for dramatic beats befitting a bereaved husband and the limits of revenge, I think. But this screenplay (written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli) promises a lot from the start, and then delivers little to back it up. After a while, the narrow escapes and Charlie’s occasional tech-aided gotchas become repetitive. It felt a bit like the life was draining away from the movie the longer it went on — as if this was more of an imitation of a good movie than an actually good movie. (The technical name for this among critics is a “nothingburger.”)
The best paranoid thrillers, films like “Three Days of the Condor,” “Klute” and “The Conversation,” came out in the mid-1970s, a deeply distrustful era. It was a time marked by suspicion of government officials following conspiracies like Watergate, rampant inflation and a dip in America’s place in the world. Those movies worked so well on audiences (and retain their power today) because they mirrored viewers’ own sense of things: that the world wasn’t safe, that the guys in power were mostly interested in their own gain, that the little guy could not really prevail. Something was slipping away and would never come back. Truth was a malleable thing.
Given the state of the world 50 years later, we’re probably ripe for another round of paranoid thrillers, and “The Amateur” spends a good bit of run time trying to be one. But Charlie is both too savvy (when it comes to tech stuff) and too hapless (when it comes to spycraft) to fit the bill, and the film ends with more of a shrug than a revelation, or even a gut punch. There’s a place for the kind of movie that “The Amateur” is, too — but that place, I think, is probably on the screen in front of you during a long-haul flight.
The Amateur
Rated PG-13 for fighting, explosions, bad language and things of that sort. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters.
