Logic suggests that rogue CIA assassin Jason Bourne might be much less of a threat if — instead of a shredded government super-soldier with a sniper’s accuracy and no personal attachments — he were a vaguely autistic wife guy who couldn’t hit someone with a bazooka if they were standing right in front of him. James Hawes’ “The Amateur” begs to differ.
An aggressively competent spy thriller that has less use for logic than its lead actor does for his smile, this globe-trotting Robert Littell adaptation would have us believe that no one is more dangerous than a math nerd who refuses to think of himself as a killer, and the film makes a compelling enough case to sustain itself across the entire television season’s worth of plot that it packs into two hours. Rami Malek has made that argument before, of course, and the “Mr. Robot” star’s decision to play another socially maladapted hacker type suggests that he would rather weaponize his established strengths than correct for his weaknesses — an oddly fitting choice for the savant-like cryptographer he plays here.
An unblinking human sweater vest who’s married to a beatific Rachel Brosnahan, Langley-based cryptographer Charlie Heller loves exactly three things in this world: His wife, his wife, and sifting through confidential data sets in order to determine that unknown members of the CIA have been assassinating targets in the Middle East and blaming the kills on suicide bombers. But mostly he loves his wife. When Sarah asks Charlie to make him a cup of coffee in the morning, he replies “of course!” with the enthusiasm of a dog who’s just been asked if it wants to go for a walk; in a spy movie so humorless it makes “The Good Shepherd” look like “Goldmember” by comparison, Malek’s sincerity in that moment is the closest thing we get to a laugh.
Unfortunately for Charlie, Sarah so obviously exists to get fridged that she might as well be a piece of Tupperware. And so, when our mild-mannered hero’s wife is taken hostage — and killed execution style — while on a business trip to London, Charlie is the only person on Earth who seems to be surprised. CIA Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany, born for this) certainly knows more than he lets on, even if his boss (Julianne Nicholson in full “Paradise” mode) seems to be in the dark.
When Charlie resolves to hunt down the men who killed Sarah, Director Moore only agrees to let the twerpy computer genius get some much-needed field training because a firing range is a really convenient place to put someone who you might want to shoot “by accident.” That gruesome job would fall to Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), a rather Morpheus-like mentor who feels like he’s wasting his time on a brilliant man who doesn’t have what it takes to pull the trigger. And Robert is right on both counts: Charlie is smart enough to slip off to Europe before the CIA has the chance to wipe him off the board, and also gutless enough that he tries to commit his first kill with… pollen.
And so it goes for a cloak and dagger yarn that uses its outward seriousness as a cover for the silliness at its core — a cover that it maintains with the help of Volker Bertelmann’s sawing, “Conclave”-loud violin score. Still, “The Amateur” never forgets its true identity, and while Hawes’ previous feature, the Holocaust-tinged biographical drama “One Life,” offers a strangely accurate preview of the tone at work here, the film seldom takes itself as seriously as its po-faced spycraft might suggest. Imagine a movie shot to resemble a less shaky version of “The Bourne Identity,” except — in the first proper fight scene — our hero isn’t throwing down with a beefed out henchman so much as he’s clawing at a middle-aged woman who’s in the middle of asphyxiating from an allergy attack. And he only wins the bout on a technicality.
“The Amateur” doesn’t play any of this for comedy, but there’s something inherently funny about Malek’s surprise at his character’s own capacity for violence. Even as Charlie evolves into a master hitman, he’s still caught off guard by the sounds of his own explosions, and — as it criss-crosses Europe from one target to the next — the movie is sustained by the way that Malek allows the character’s discomfort to grow alongside his confidence (the former expressed through the actor’s eyes, the latter exclusively with the point of his chin).
By that, and by the all too rare decision to (obviously) shoot on location. So far as “Bourne” wannabes go, this one is awful light on action, but Hawes uses the money he saved on massive stunts to shoot Malek scurrying through the nightclubs of Marseille, the hilly streets of Istanbul, and a handful of other very real places that all combine to lend the action — or lack thereof — a degree of movement that’s credible enough to disguise how Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s screenplay prefers to spin in circles.
Running a well-paced two hours, “The Amateur” doesn’t have time to stuff in all of the stuff that its story requires in order to make (enough) sense by the end, which forces a crucial thread like the departmental pissing match between Charlie’s CIA bosses to feel like a supplemental B-plot rather than something that’s inextricable from Charlie’s mission. The same could be said of Fishburne’s character, whose allegiance is more fun to track than his whereabouts, and of Jon Bernthal’s two-scene performance as a badass field agent known as The Bear (lol), who exists to personify the kind of spy movie we’re used to seeing.
Even major aspects of Charlie’s emotionality tend to fall by the wayside, as “The Amateur” — more self-assured than its main character, but similarly unwilling to get its hands dirty — only glancingly connects the dots between its protagonist’s extra-judicial killings and the ones the CIA is trying to keep covered up. The implication is that modern technology has turned murder into a coward’s game, as the growing distance between weapons and their targets invites the kind of moral disconnect that allows people to lie to themselves (and their country), but the disconnect between Charlie and his handlers is too vast for either of them to render dramatically interesting judgment on the other.
If the movie wags its finger at Charlie as he closes in on the man who executed his wife (Michael Stuhlbarg as a bearded German baddie), that’s only because the seriousness of its tone requires “The Amateur” to gesture toward depth, just as the absurdity of its plot occasionally requires “The Amateur” to remind us that it’s not that serious — which it accomplishes with the help of some ridiculously angelic visions of Sarah, dead-wifing so hard that it feels like she’s hoping to be reincarnated into a Christopher Nolan film. That balancing act results in a spy adventure that’s neither fun nor dull, and in almost exactly equal measure. But there’s no doubt that Charlie is dangerous, and I wouldn’t be opposed to a sequel where he’s forced to figure out what to do with that information; a sequel in which neither he nor the potential franchise around him can write off its errors as rookie mistakes.
Grade: C+
20th Century Studios will release “The Amateur” in theaters on Friday, April 11.
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