The Amateur (2025)
Can a computer virtuoso CIA analyst turn cold-blooded avenger? Click here.
The Amateur (2025)
In theaters
Starting with its title, The Amateur upends expectations, pulls a fast one by giving us a “sensitive” hero and throws curves when, judging by the trailer, we might have shown up looking for a straight-ahead macho rout.
In an action flick we expect to follow not a neophyte – an amateur – but a hard-edged pro who’ll get the dirty job done. Otherwise, what’s the deal?
Well, here it’s not quite what you’d imagine, at least not right off.
Gifted but shy cryptographer Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is a happy guy. With his 170 IQ he’s an ace at his job on the underground floors of the CIA’s Decryption and Analysis Department at Langley headquarters.
He’s also blissfully married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan). As she goes off to a business conference in London, he smilingly runs alongside her Uber as it pulls away, hating to see her go.
Alas, he won’t see Sarah alive again. In a terrorist attack in London Sarah is murdered and the four assailants get away. Charlie, aching for revenge, wants to be trained to take down Sarah’s killers.
No way, say his bosses, Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany) and his colleague Caleb Horowitz (Danny Sapani). CIA analysts don’t go into the field, period.
Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) patiently exposes Charlie (Rami Malek) to the art of the kill
There’s no stifling a determined tech whiz, though, so Moore puts him in the hands of a seasoned trainer, Henderson (Laurence Fishburne, in a sterling performance). Henderson tries to toughen up Charlie for the mission he’s assigned himself, but ultimately tells the computer genius, “You’re just not a killer, Charlie.”
Charlie’s not having that. Before Moore or Henderson can blink, he dummies up multiple fake passports, packs his bag with tech tools and gizmos, and is on a plane to London to begin his search for Sarah’s killers.
His quest will take him from there to Paris, Marseilles, Madrid, Istanbul, Romania and Russia. All the while with Henderson, dispatched by the home office, in hot pursuit.
We’ve seen that Charlie’s a lousy shot, but with his technical acumen he devises ways to kill that take his victims by wicked surprise.
He tries to wipe out one while she’s relaxing in an enclosed glass-walled spa chamber. He pumps pollen, of all things, into the space, which could kill her. When she smashes her way out and comes for Charlie, he doesn’t shrink from fatal hand-to-hand combat.
Malek is surprisingly adept and believable as a man trained in algorithms and web surveillance who suddenly has to turn assassin. Whether he can stay across that line is what keeps the story moving and the tension building. How ruthless can this newly formed avenger become?
The actor’s slight frame, quavery vocal inflections and millisecond-hesitant manner combine to give Charlie’s newly found killer instincts a frightening power.
Charlie’s rage fills him so unexpectedly just before he detonates an explosive, that when the blast comes, he doesn’t, like Bond or Bourne, coolly walk away. He blinks and winces in surprise, with a chilling smile only slowly filling his face.
The wily Charlie (Rami Malek) gains an icy proficiency on the hunt for his wife’s killers
Director James Hawes has mostly worked in television (Slow Horses), but he gives the action keen, even-keeled twists. He brings cinematographer Martin Ruhe and editor Jonathan Amos into close collaboration, keeping the visuals seamless and sharp.
He also is able to work from a strong foundation in Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s screenplay (from a novel by Robert Littell), which foregrounds action but doesn’t let Charlie’s humanity, his grieving for his wife, ever leave him. Along with cherished memories of Sarah, we see a “ghost” of her haunting him throughout his journey.
But her killers were merely mercenaries. Who was the mastermind controlling them? It’s no spoiler to point out that the masterful Michael Stuhlbarg (Call Me by Your Name, The Post, The Shape of Water) makes for an entrancing villain. He lowers his voice with such piercing, implacable menace, I held my breath all the while he was on screen.
Malek proves an able scene partner for him and brings Charlie’s quest to a jolting but also a sad end. We can’t forget that he’s left dead bodies in his wake, and however “justified” the taking of those lives may seem, he’s never going to be the benign tech prodigy we first met.
Yet the ending leaves the whiff of a sequel in the closing moments. An unexpected life saved hints that more could be coming from Charlie. But he won’t be an underestimated “amateur” ever again.
This is Malek’s first major role since his Oscar-winning portrait of Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody (2018). This is not a groundbreaking movie, but it’s a serious notch upward for Malek, who here demonstrates without question that he can hold a picture together. The industry ought to give this magnetic actor some space.