THE AMATEUR Review: First-time Spy vs. CIA Conspiracy

Sinister conspiracies, globe-trotting locations, lone hero fighting the odds: all the makings of a solid Hollywood espionage thriller can be found in The Amateur, from Robert Littell's 1981 novel.

Oscar- and Emmy-winner Rami Malek, the evil genius who killed James Bond, plays Charlie Heller, an unassuming IT nerd buried in a CIA basement in Langley. In Malek's portrayal, Charlie might be on the spectrum. Mumbling to himself, hypnotized by an array of computer monitors, non-assertive in the extreme, he's a less-confident version of Ben Affleck's Accountant.

Unlike Liam Neeson's agent of revenge, Charlie has no physical skills. "You're not a killer," people keep reminding him. What he has is a dogged determination to find the people who killed his wife Sarah, played by former Mrs. Maisel and pending Lois Lane Rachel Brosnahan.

It's a measure of how profligate the filmmakers are that Sarah's murdered in the opening scenes, without much of a chance to make a mark. She haunts the rest of the film in poorly conceived flashbacks, leading viewers to assume that she has a hidden backstory and perhaps re-emerge as a spy herself.

No such luck. The Amateur introduces several red herrings like Sarah that fail to pay off. Or Jon Bernthal, playing a bearded CIA field agent who pops up in Romania to warn Charlie about something or other and promptly disappears.

The smoothly impersonal production takes a mix-and-match approach to the espionage formula, drawing largely from the Bourne franchise for inspiration. Instead of a bioengineered assassin, we get a literal amateur trained to kill by CIA master agent "Hendo" Henderson (Laurence Fishburne).

Instead of villains David Strathairn or Brian Cox, we get Holt McCallany, polishing his bad-guy persona while still remaining a bit too detached from the plot. Rather than Joan Allen, substitute Julianne Nicholson, doing her best to imitate a CIA director.

After spending way too much time setting up a CIA conspiracy, the plot drags Charlie all over Europe, from an allergy clinic in Paris to a pub in Marseille to a freighter on the Baltic to Madrid, every location getting its own carefully boring drone shot. This is plush, glossy stuff you've seen before, but it's pleasant enough to waste time in seedy hotel rooms, misty cobblestone alleys, or shipyards aglow with welding sparks.

The script by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli actually tries some character growth. Charlie at first blunders through encounters; later he plants bombs and hijacks computers with equanimity. He's even an IT nerd who gets the girl, a widowed Russian geek played by Caitríona Balfe. ("I just want to sleep for one night with a person holding me," she sighs as she slips into Charlie's sofa bed.)

Director James Hawes, a veteran of Slow Horses, Black Mirror, and similar prestige TV series, gives a professional sheen to scenes that don't really deserve it. The action set pieces are frenetic but largely forgettable, leading to a climax aboard a trawler that dissolves into one of those endless explanations of why a foolproof, air-tight plan failed.

Films like this were a staple during the Cold War, with everyone from George Segal to Gregory Peck trying their hand at spy paranoia. The Amateur fits comfortably into that middlebrow tradition: comfort food stuffed with empty calories, satisfying even when you know it's not good for you.

(Photo by John Wilson. © 2024 20th Century Studios.)

The film opens Friday, April 11, only in movie theaters. Visit the official site for showtimes and locations.