Malek's Industry Hacktivism: The Rote Comfort of 'The Amateur'

The Amateur will leave your mind the moment you leave the theater. And that’s kind of a good thing. James Hawes’ remake of the 1981 novel adaptation for 20th Century Studios is a rote yet competent spy movie that carries a $60 million price tag and boasts an Academy Award-winning lead. The Amateur is not special, it does not break new ground through craft or genre innovations, but it does feel like a season’s worth of TV packed into two hours, and it is quite watchable. We used to get ten of these a year. 

Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s screenplay takes Rami Malek’s Charlie Heller, a coder/cryptographer/geek extraordinaire for the CIA, and robs him of his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) by way of terrorist execution in broad daylight. Furious at the agency’s lack of interest in pursuing revenge, Heller demands he be trained as a field-op and eventually goes after his wife’s killers himself, with a little help from the old veteran Henderson (Laurence Fishburne).

With the loss of the so-so mid-budget movie, the industry lost its bread and butter. Much ado has been made over the last few years about the rise and dominance of the tentpole in favor of literally any other studio programming, of which The Amateur would find itself in mixed company with the likes of movies with B+ ceilings from Wolfgang Petersen, Philip Noyce, Roger Donaldson, or any other of the brilliantly okay journeyman directors who helmed countless perfectly forgettable genre flicks with A-listers above the title.

Though not necessarily an A-lister, Malek is still the driving force behind the marketing of The Amateur. He is above the title billed as an Academy Award winner and he produced the whole affair. For all its peaks and valleys, there is something noble about the film’s attempts to revive the star vehicle. What was unremarkable in the ‘90s is still unremarkable, but its familiarity warms the soul through some sycophantic nostalgia.

An aura of prestige TV has reigned over much of Malek’s post-Oscar career aside from his supporting turns in No Time to Die (2021) and Oppenheimer (2023), but he somehow makes it work here where it didn’t work in his 2021 Denzel Washington and Hypebeast Joker triple header The Little Things. The sterile gloss of cold-toned 2010s television mixed successfully with Malek’s jittery and off-kilter performance style during his star turn in Mr. Robot. That same mixture does him well in The Amateur, where Malek gets to carry the weight of a movie on his shoulders for the first time since his now-questionable Oscar win.

Malek acquits himself well enough as a leading man by not playing into the archetypes one would expect from a movie like this, though the premise does a lot of heavy lifting. The concept “What if Jason Bourne was a mega-geek wife-guy slash MacGyver?” isn’t too hard to buy into, and Hawes knows this, withholding any spice for a solid enough foundation. The film plods along with the pomp and circumstance of a red light turning green: there’s some movement, a little excitement, but everyone knows what’s going to happen before it does. Yet, that predictability doesn’t take away from the very basic joys that both can provide. Who isn’t happy when their red light turns green?

Unflashy craft and predictably satisfying plotting should never be a high bar nor a qualifier for success, yet in a cinematic landscape so saturated with bottom-of-the-barrel slop, especially from this film’s parent company, Disney, it’s a bit of a refresher to see mainstream fare so totally achieving its middlebrow goals. The Amateur should not warrant a celebration for being a future cable classic on Sunday afternoons, but sometimes it truly is about the little things*.

*Not The Little Things (2021).

The Amateur is now playing in theaters everywhere.

-August