Considering tech nerds are the ones now systematically destroying the planet, they don’t particularly deserve the Jason Bourne rebrand that The Amateur provides. Still, Rami Malek plays to type so well, having first come to the world’s attention playing a hacker in television’s Mr Robot, that you can’t really begrudge him running around London, Paris and Istanbul, breaking into CCTV cameras and shattering sky pools with a bit of code.
This thriller, a reimagined take on Robert Littell’s 1981 novel, is both deeply conventional and pleasingly silly, shot with the sleek minimalism of a car ad by director James Hawes, known for his work on Apple TV+’s Slow Horses. It not only kicks off with a dead wife (Rachel Brosnahan’s Sarah), but then has said dead wife periodically waltz back onto screen in the form of a grief-struck hallucination, tossing her deep-conditioned brown hair and smiling like the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen in a stock photo.
Malek’s Charlie Heller at least has an unusual way of enacting bloody vengeance on her killers. He’s a CIA cryptographer with such an elevated IQ (170, as someone makes sure to point out), that he out-nerds the little clique of nerds he sits with at lunch. They gawk at the special friendship he’s forged with genuine spy Jackson O’Brien (Jon Bernthal), having once saved his life.
In fact, he’s a little too good at his job, which is how he ends up with his mitts on damning evidence that the CIA has been covering up its own war crimes – here, writers Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli strive to be pointedly apolitical, with a story that’s sceptical about power but happy to lay the blame on a few bad eggs in an otherwise honourable system. It’s enough ammo for him to blackmail his boss, deputy director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), into offering Charlie the training needed to take out his wife’s killers himself.
Charlie is, as Alex jokes, someone who couldn’t “beat a 90-year-old nun in an arm wrestle”. And the fun little twist of The Amateur is that, despite being assigned Laurence Fishburne as a mentor, he doesn’t come out the other end knowing kung fu or popping off shots like John Wick. He remains, for the audience’s entertainment, deeply uncool. Charlie has to down three tequila shots mid-chase purely to summon up the courage to navigate a busy club. He requires a YouTube how-to video in order to lock-pick a target’s door. His methods of execution feel like punchlines in their own right.
Malek makes all those hijinks feel believable enough. He’s always been gifted in nonverbal expression, a talent ironically wasted in his overdone, Oscar-winning turn as Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody. When Charlie’s body freezes and his eyes refuse to blink, we’re handed a front-row view to every neuron in his head powering through the calculations needed merely to accept the reality that his wife is dead.
That makes Charlie an interesting foil to the string of cookie-cutter spy characters he encounters, from the enthusiastically accented wife of an ex-KGB officer (Caitríona Balfe) to Michael Stuhlbarg’s Bond-primed villain, pottering around with his hands behind his back, delivering monologues with weary finesse. We’ve seen all this before, but at least The Amateur finds its own way to get the job done.
Dir: James Hawes. Starring: Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt McCallany, Laurence Fishburne. Cert 12A, 123 minutes.
‘The Amateur’ is in cinemas from 11 April