'The Amateur' Review: Wannabe 90s Espionage Thriller Fails to Decode a Distinctive Identity
We have Michael Man—I mean Mr. Rob—I mean Jason Bour—I mean Tony Scot—I mean Edward Snowden at home.
'The Amateur' Review: Wannabe 90s Espionage Thriller Fails to Decode a Distinctive Identity
Nowadays, it is extremely rare for a studio to release an espionage thriller. In the late 90s and early 2000s, we got three-to-five every year. Today, they are either ground out of the Netflix content mine with an insane price tag, only to be seen by little to no one, or they're made on the cheap, only to be found at the bottom of a Walgreens bargain bin. Because the 90s is so hot in 2025 culture, there's no better reason for a studio to release an espionage thriller that evokes 90s energy. However, 20th Century Studios' The Amateur, starring Rami Malek and Laurence Fishburne, has the sheen of better 90s movies but lacks the identity and the intellect to be the throwback classic it desperately wants to be.
Image copyright (©) Courtesy of 20th Century Studios
MPA Rating: PG13 (Some strong violence, and language.)
Runtime: 1 Hour and 40 Minutes
Production Companies: Hutch Parker Entertainment
Distributor: 20th Century Studios
Director: James Hawes
Writers: Ken Nolan, Gary Spinelli
Cast: Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson, Adrian Martinez, Danny Sapani, Laurence Fishburne
Release Date: April 11, 2025
Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is a skillful yet awkward CIA decoder and the ultimate wife guy. One day at work, he learns that his superior, CIA Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), was involved in unauthorized attacks abroad. Shortly after, he's informed by Moore and his boss Samantha O'Brien (Julianne Nicholson) that a terrorist attack has taken place in London and his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), who was there for a conference, was a casualty. When Moore refuses to do anything about it, Heller blackmails him and asks to be trained as a field agent so that he can set out against his wife's killers himself. After being trained by Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), Heller embarks on a globe-trotting revenge quest, but now has to look over his shoulder as his own government tries to find him.
Aw, you wanna be 90s so badly.
Walking out of The Amateur, I thought maybe if I were in my 40s-50s I would appreciate this, but then I remembered the X'ers had Michael Mann's The Insider, Tony Scott's Enemy of the State, and the Bourne series. The Amateur amalgamates all the X'er classics of the sub-genre from the past 30 years like a Cronenberg monster of dull thriller clichés to the point where it has no identity. It tries to be a Mann and Scott flick, a Bourne knock-off, create parallels to Edward Snowden to make it contemporary, and have Malek use his Mr. Robot acting abilities for good measure. As it trudges through a rather generic revenge-premise with 101 plotting, the cracks begin to show. From its script that was rewritten to high hell (the first draft was done in 2006 when Hugh Jackman was slated to play Heller) to Jason Hewes' generic and miscast filmmaking, it all makes you wish you were just watching any of the films it's trying to ape.
All the generic tropes seen in thrillers of this ilk are present and accounted for, including my favorite: "the dead ol’ doting wife only to be seen in flashbacks to beat you over the head of what the lead is fighting for”. In this case, it was a wasted Rachel Brosnahan performance, who's only there to be adorable and dead.
The Amateur's Spice Girls-styled wannabe-90s veneer also manifests in the muggy cinematography. It adopts a muted color palette that thinks that it’s trying to evoke a classic 90s thriller, when in reality it looks as dry as every other blockbuster released these days. Yet above all else, Hewes, whose work is predominately on television, lacks the skill set to pull off the slickness the feature wants. Whenever it tries to lean into action, Hewes' direction is pretty pedestrian in set pieces and even worse in combat scenes, which falls into the same ol' generic close-up handheld composition and sloppy editing.
Charlie Heller ain't no badass nor amateur.
I wish I could say that at least the stuff you see in the trailer is fun, when Heller gets on his Jigsaw shit and uses imaginative ways to torture or straight up kill his foes. But simply I can't because the writing is completely inconsistent and unable to develop Heller's character beyond "wife guy" and slightly autistic — big year for that archetype, between this and Black Bag. The film constantly wants you to believe that Charlie Heller is cold, callous, and one step ahead of everybody in the room, usually making his superiors at the CIA chase their own tail. However, what's depicted onscreen is Heller constantly fumbling, coming apart at the seams, running around Europe with a big ol' target on his back, committing homicides/terrorist attacks in public with bizarre contraptions, and never for a second does the film take the time to explain how he was able to pull off any of his ridiculous accomplishments.
Man, Rami Malek just does not have the acting chops to carry a movie like this. TV, sure, but a studio blockbuster, not really. His performance is okay, but he never does enough to overcome the weak script. The film only comes alive whenever Laurence Fishburne is onscreen as Henderson, who often pops up out of the blue to track Heller and provides some much-needed charisma to this dull affair. Heck, I'd say the same for its entertaining supporting players, Julianne Nicholson, Michael Stuhlberg, Jon Bernthal, and Caitríona Balfe, who try to do the most with what little they're working with all while running laps around a mid Malek.
Above all else, the nothingness of the film’s plot, direction, and lead performance make The Amateur a chore to sit through. I was really hoping to enjoy it, but it has no idea what kind of espionage thriller it wants to be, to the extent that by its climax, it shrugs its shoulders up and cops out. The movie becomes so disinterested in itself that it leaves you with nothing. Given how indifferent I was to it altogether, I can only give it props for being consistently hollow across the board.
FINAL STATEMENT
We have Michael Man—I mean Mr. Rob—I mean Jason Bour—I mean Tony Scot—I mean Edward Snowden at home.
