‘The Amateur’ Review: Rami Malek Joins the Dead Wives Club in Stodgy, Data-Driven Thriller [C]

Hollywood has long been obsessed with stories about ordinary men finding inner strength to do extraordinary things. Most often that strength comes from grief and a need for vengeance when tragedy strikes close to home. In The Amateur, Rami Malek plays one such man, a genius CIA analyst who leaves his Langley desk to venture out into the world to track down and kill the terrorists who murdered his wife.

The popular term “fridging” was first credited to Gail Simone who wrote about the comic book trope of murdering or otherwise brutalizing (primarily) female characters in order to motivate men to action. While she coined the term in reaction to a specific storyline in The Green Lantern and expanded it to other comics, it has since become a common descriptor for a trope in movies that dates back decades. Ridley Scott fridged wives in both Gladiator films. Christopher Nolan is a notorious fridger of women from Memento to Tenet. There is the 1974 Charles Bronson film Death Wish and the original 1987 Lethal Weapon. John Wick’s wife has died from cancer before the movie starts, but when bad guys come for the puppy she left him, he is out for blood. In Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island Leonardo DiCaprio’s widower FBI Agent is called in to investigate a missing woman, only for the audience to later discover an even darker and more twisted tragedy has occurred.  Deadpool 2 used the trope and — the story goes — reversed it due to poor audience reactions, then went further by making fun of themselves for it.

In The Amateur, Malek plays Charlie Heller, an introverted computer and puzzle whiz who barely talks to anyone and has coworkers but not real friends. Somehow he fell in love with and married Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), a woman who has an unspecified job that sends her to international conferences, but does little else besides smile adoringly at Charlie’s quirks. In the film’s opening moments we see the couple live alone in what appears to be an isolated farmhouse, although it is also in a neighborhood. They have no children or pets, only their love for each other and an old plane Charlie is restoring in the garage.

We learn very little about Charlie or Sarah from this introduction. Only that they don’t seem to need anyone but each other and also that Charlie has never left the country. Sarah asks him to join her at the conference in London but he declines and puts her in a cab to the airport before driving to his job at the George Bush Center for Intelligence in Langley. He has lunch with some of his colleagues (Evan Milton, Tiffany Gray, and Adrian Martinez) and they all seem to like each other, but Charlie has acquaintances instead of friends. 

A lot of The Amateur feels like it is an entire season of a television series compressed into a two-hour movie. Which makes sense when you consider that James Hawes, who directs this remake of the 1981 film that starred John Savage and Christopher Plummer, is best known for his TV work on series such as Slow Horses, Penny Dreadful, and Black Mirror. In his second feature, the plot moves both too quickly and too slowly, we learn very little about anyone — including Charlie, and side characters that seem like they should be important are reduced to a few throwaway scenes. These people and storylines might have worked in a series with multiple episodes and seasons to craft arcs that pay off down the line. Instead, there is an attempt at balancing Charlie’s lack of experience with his bloodlust and the result is a film that feels like driving in rush hour traffic, hitting the gas whenever there is an opening, and slamming on the brakes every time you’re on the verge of getting somewhere.

The Amateur is a series of attempts at intrigue, spycraft, and revenge thriller, but without the confidence to engage with our real-world threats. Where the original was set in the midst of the Cold War, a geopolitical chess match rife with cinematic stories to tell, the remade version can’t decide which threats to highlight and so turns inward to the villains at home, and yet can’t quite turn it into a captivating brain game. 

When Charlie learns Sarah has been killed in a hostage situation in London, he has no one. He throws himself into learning the identities of the four terrorists, begging his boss Director Moore (Holt McCallany) to put him through CIA training and send him out into the field. Moore resists because he has his own secrets that could be revealed if Charlie gets too close. But the director is little more than a garden-variety bad cop in a position of power who has spent his career calling the shots and not answering to anyone. He has a new boss (Julianne Nicholson) though, who promises transparency and has a lot of questions about his off-the-books operations. This is another storyline that could play out well over the course of a series but doesn’t get enough room to breathe when the real story is about Charlie and his impossible mission.

Other supporting players include Jon Bernthal as an active CIA operative named The Bear (no, really) whose storyline seems to have almost entirely been cut from the final draft. His early introduction is promising, but then he is forgotten until a later scene that adds very little. Laurence Fishburne suffers a similar fate, although we do see more of him as Captain Henderson, a retired agent assigned to the hopeless task of training Charlie, but who has a separate, secret order to thwart his trainee’s success. Fishburne is always reliable, but Henderson is written in such a way that he feels more like a spoof of his Matrix character Morpheus than a real person. 

Charlie globe trots through France, Turkey, and Spain on his personal mission just like James Bond or Ethan Hunt would. Unlike similar movies though, the settings are incidental and interchangeable. Charlie could just as easily be tracking someone down in Cleveland as Paris. There is no engagement with the locals, no effort to make a visit to Istanbul actually mean anything or to use the streets of Marseilles for some inventive chase. Other than London’s Sky Pool, which has been a key part of the marketing, the primary focus is on the interiors, trying to be moody cool with stylistically dim-lit intelligence offices and ornate hotel rooms. All of the things that make this genre so fun become mundane and uninteresting here.

The Amateur wisely leans into Charlie’s inexperience rather than turning him into some kind of espionage prodigy. But it does little with the things he is actually good at, other than tell us again and again that he is good at them.  One would expect an actor of Rami Malek’s caliber to bring something interesting even to a thinly written role, except that he doesn’t. The only thing he conveys is the boredom he must have felt in reading the script. By the end, we know nothing more about Charlie, Sarah, Moore, or anyone else, and have very little reason to emotionally invest in anything that happens to them. For a film that propels itself on the premise of fridging a man’s wife, we are the ones left feeling cold.

Grade: C

20th Century Studios will release The Amateur only in theaters on April 11.

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Karen Peterson

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