The Amateur (2025) review
Thinking about his life choices... Rami Malek in The Amateur (2025) dir. Alex Hawes. 20th Century Studios.
Rami Malek leads The Amateur, an action thriller so bullet-ridden with clichés that I’m surprised it got to cinemas alive.
Malek plays Charlie Heller, a CIA decoder who takes things into his own hands when his wife Sarah (Rachal Brosnahan) is killed by armed terrorists. Uncovering corruption from his higher-ups, he blackmails them into providing combat training so he can track down the killers.
Replete with zero romantic chemistry, dead wife flashbacks, relentless location changes, and ridiculous surveillance technology porn, this would be a great bingo-card drinking game film if it weren’t so boring. It even has an action-thriller unholy trinity of typecasting: Laurence Fishburne as gruff, wizened mentor with an edge; Jon Bernthal as ‘fix my computer, nerd!’ alpha bit part; Holt McCallany as corrupt CIA official.
Malek himself is simply playing a far less appealing of his Elliot in Mr. Robot. It works nowhere near as well here in part because of the shocking script (“That’s funny. Humour? I want mission training”), and its laughably flat efforts to vary the tone. There are some unparalleled tell-don’t-show lines, too (“The man has an IQ of 170. Let’s not take chances.”) This script has an IQ of 60, that is, well, if IQ were in any way a legitimate measurement.
The near-constant score (which often sounds very temp) and ruthless pace results in a distinct inability to savour almost anything. Ten or so minutes are vaguely fun, and about four of those are genuinely enjoyable — a couple of creative kills, and one solid knife fight. But even the potentially enjoyable side plots, like Fishburne and Malek’s cat-and-mouse chase, are so oddly un-fun. As a remake of the 1981 film of the same name, it’s all unavoidably marred in a dated thriller-language of individual vs. state, of dead-wife-revenge, and of the CIA’s only problems being bad apples.
We’re shown that Charlie can shoot accurately only at point blank. The same can be said for the film as a whole, a sawn-off shotgun blast of mediocrity that leaves you waiting for a twist that never comes. Half a point for getting Laurence Fishburne to say “Deux Heinekens, s’il vous plait”.