Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: James Hawes
Starring: Rami Malek, Laurence Fishburne, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt
McCallany, Julianne Nicholson
1981's The Amateur was an early entry in the wave of '80s
Cold War thrillers that simultaneously exploited both the public's growing
interest and general ignorance of computers. Rather than a James Bond
figure, the protagonist was a nerdy codebreaker who becomes a proto
MacGyver, using brains rather than brawn to seek revenge for the killing of
his wife by terrorists. The use of technology in the movie was absolute
hokum, but 1981 audiences simply didn't know any better and assumed that
maybe an arcade machine could be reconstituted as a code-breaking
device.
Now that we all carry more computing power in our pockets than the Pentagon
had access to in 1981, it's become virtually impossible for movies to fool
us with ramshackle depictions of technology. As such, this second adaptation
of Robert Littell's source novel struggles with its basic setup. The
(anti?)hero is still a socially awkward, code-breaking boffin, but he never
actually deploys any convincing use of technology in his quest for
vengeance. Preferring to blow his enemies to pieces with IEDs, this version
of The Amateur might as well have been set in 1981, were it
not for the intrusion of modern mass surveillance.
A miscast Rami Malek (barely awake and impersonating John Malkovich)
is Charlie Heller, a decoder who works in the bowels of Langley. Via an
anonymous source, Heller learns that his boss, the CIA's deputy director
Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), has been ordering drone strikes on
civilian targets and framing them as suicide bombings. Heller decides to
keep quiet about this knowledge until his wife (Rachel Brosnahan in a thankless role constructed around cheesy flashbacks) is executed
by terrorists during a business trip to London. Unhappy with Moore's
reluctance to go after the terrorists, Heller blackmails his boss into
allowing him to hunt down his wife's killers himself, following some
rigorous but largely ineffectual training at the hands of the gruff Colonel
Henderson (Laurence Fishburne).
Once Heller finds himself in Europe, The Amateur becomes
indistinguishable from the scores of espionage thrillers it's tailing. The
influence of the Jason Bourne movies is writ large, with the CIA tracking
Heller on his path to vengeance and the obligatory female companion in the
form of a Russian defector played by Caitriona Balfe with a terrible
accent (when will Hollywood figure out that they have actors in Eastern
Europe?). But what's sorely lacking are the sort of cleverly constructed
set-pieces that earned The Bourne Identity and its first two
sequels such acclaim. There's little in the way of action here, and what we
do get is thoroughly unconvincing (a car chase ends when Heller's pursuers
simply give up for no discernible reason).
Perhaps The Amateur's biggest issue is that it focusses on the least interesting of two
storylines. We care less about Heller taking out the terrorists than we do
about the CIA being brought to justice. The terrorists kill two people,
while we're told Moore's duplicitous drone strikes have claimed the lives of
thousands of innocents. The latter subplot is barely present, relegated to a
couple of scenes in which the head of the CIA (a wasted
Julianne Nicholson) interrogates Moore. We may not see any of his
victims, but with Heller setting off explosive devices in crowded areas of
major European cities, it's likely that by the end of the movie he's killed
far more innocents than the terrorists (shades of Zack Snyder's Superman
causing more destruction to Metropolis than General Zod in
Man of Steel).
Lurching from one location to another and from scene to scene,
The Amateur has the rocky editing rhythms of a film that has
been badly butchered from a longer cut. Surely Jon Bernthal's macho
field operative played a bigger role in some earlier cut, rather than what
amounts to a cameo here. A subplot from the 1981 film that saw Christopher
Plummer sport a laughable fake mustache to play a Russian professor is
absent here, but the Wikipedia page lists the actor Takehiro Hira in
the role, which suggests it was awkwardly excised at some point. Perhaps
that's why The Amateur seems to be missing some key scenes,
and why you'll find yourself wondering if you missed something more than
once over the course of its two hours.
The '81 film was a pretty bog standard thriller, but at least it was a
movie, using images to tell its story. The best parts of that film were
those that concentrated on the process of its smarty pants protagonist
putting everything in place, with extended silent scenes of Heller
assembling various doohickeys and creating traps. In this new version we
never see any of Heller's work, rather he simply tells us how clever he is
after the fact (when Heller tells a baddy that he's rigged an elevated
swimming pool with explosives, we're left to ask "How?"). It's a striking
example of how today's Hollywood writers no longer care about the golden
storytelling rule of "show, don't tell."
The Amateur is in UK/ROI cinemas
from April 11th.
