The Amateur, a film that dares to do all the things you’ve already seen in cinema already, but to do them in such a serviceable way that you don’t really mind that you’ve already seen all the elements before in many other films. It’s a high-tech espionage revenge thriller, and it’s a pretty compelling ride!

Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is a CIA cryptographer, working for years purely behind the desk assisting the agency with decryption. His wife (Rachel Brosnahan) goes off to London for a conference, when she is murdered in a wrong-place-wrong-time situation by a team of black ops trying to take hostages. They escape and Charlie is distraught, even more so when he finds out the CIA don’t want to pursue the killers due to their own corrupt reasons. Charlie finds a way to blackmail the CIA into training him and sending him off to find the killers himself.

On the surface, yes we have seen a global trotting spy thriller many times, but there’s something engaging with what Malek brings to the character. It is quite similar to the character he plays in acclaimed TV series Mr Robot, wherein he plays a misunderstood hacker who tries to take down society, here in The Amateur he plays a misunderstood hacker who tries to take down the bad guys instead. This is a character that suits Malek’s sensibilities really well, he plays that nervous nerdy outsider so perfectly and maybe that’s why I think this is his first proper great post-Oscar role because this is his bread and butter. I could have another three movies where he plays Charlie Heller taking down bad guys is his computer genius way. 

The supporting cast are absolutely stacked with some of the best supporting actors you’ve got in the business: Jon Bernthal, Laurence Fishburne, Holt McCallany, Caitriona Balfe, so may great actors who just pop up and deliver solid performances. Rachel Brosnahan plays his wife who dies early in the film but comes back multiple times as Malek feels like she’s still in the room with him. It’s very trope-y to have that ‘dead wife flashbacks while laughing’ or ‘I can still hear my dead wife’s voice in my ear’, that being said if you’re going to have any character that looks like a long lost dead wife it’s going to be Brosnahan, her image does really encapsulate that essence.

This film is shot well, the score is solid and there are some interesting set pieces. A scene in which Malek tortures someone with pollen is up there with one of the most inventive ways I’ve seen someone get information out of a suspect. However, there is a momentum in the 1st act during the murder and the training that is then lost when he does finally get to Europe to start searching. That 2nd act drags a lot and I’m not sure the final payoff scene is as climactic as I would’ve liked, and maybe about 10 minutes too long in the runtime too. But director James Hawes does a good job with this, you can imagine this is some kind of Bond audition for the British director, and if he did make one in the future I don’t think it would be too bad of an idea.