When Disney bought 20th Century Fox some years back, the assumption and fear was that the new parent company intended to use Fox’s most successful sci-fi and horror properties—your Aliens, your Predators, your Planets Of The Apes—without necessarily preserving much else about the studio’s history, recent or otherwise. The Amateur initially feels like an attempt to disprove this notion: It’s a globe-trotting thriller about adult humans, based on an old spy novel, starring Rami Malek, who won an Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody, one of Fox’s final pre-Disney triumphs. If you think Old Fox is gone, the movie seems to say, wait until you see our new big-budget adventure that brings to mind Red Sparrow or Body Of Lies—movies that weren’t even hits!
He’s also blessed with the skills to help track down the perpetrators via his command of technology—and lobbies for the improbable chance to take them out in person, too. His agency bosses humor him with some training from hard-bitten Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), who concludes that his new pupil lacks true killer instinct (as well as, you know, marksmanship, physical strength, that sort of thing). Ah, but Charlie isn’t necessarily depending on the agency’s blessing to exact his revenge; soon he’s disappeared from the CIA facility in order to hopscotch across the globe in the popular hoodie-and-ballcap skulking outfit, setting torture-traps for the terrorists that suggest a Jason Statham character subcontracting out to Jigsaw. Bad guys and sorta-good guys alike soon follow his meticulous rogue exploits, which do have an irresistible entertainment value once they get rolling.
Malek, with his piercing eyes and Malkovichian purr, has the intensity to play Charlie as an obsessive vigilante paying deadly tribute to the love of his life; at times, the movie seems to characterize being this degree of Wife Guy as a form of neurodivergence. But The Amateur, directed by TV veteran James Hawes, never seems particularly curious about Charlie’s DIY quirks, beyond a few funny touches like him hastily calling up a YouTube lockpicking tutorial on his phone (and a few discomfiting moments, like the scene where he hasn’t yet found out about the London terror attack because he, an adult who works in government, hasn’t yet decided on a trustworthy source of news). If Sarah’s earlier comments about his lack of travel experience are supposed to set up a story about a naïf who hacks his way into geopolitical intrigue, that film never fully materializes, instead focusing more intently on meat-and-potatoes spy-thriller stuff. Actually, it’s not that meaty; it’s more of a mostly-potatoes situation, with a fittingly starchy performance from Malek.
The country-hopping does make The Amateur something of a modern-day Disney miracle: a 2020s movie with some actual location work. Hawes doesn’t draw much visual character out of England, France, Turkey, etc., but it’s clear that many of the actors are inhabiting the real, physical world, and given the post-pandemic tendency to let the world come to the greater Atlanta area, that ain’t hay. If only the stacked supporting cast had a little more to do in those locations. Holt McCallany has some fun as a duplicitous CIA deputy director, making a literal meal of a restaurant scene opposite his boss, played by Julianne Nicholson. But Nicholson and the litany of similarly welcome faces like Fishburne, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, and Adrian Martinez, all perpetually feel a scene or two short of turning an impressive list of names into the kind of character-actor ensemble that makes these movies so watchable. They’re all prepping for juicy conflicts that never quite come to a head. (Caitríona Balfe, as a shadowy contact of Charlie’s, gets a little more to do.)
Like those actors, though, The Amateur maintains its baseline professionalism throughout. It also has the distance and hollowness of an echo, like it’s arriving with the built-in tinniness of an airplane screening and the network-TV sanitization cuts already made. In addition to sanding the edges off of past spy movies, The Amateur wants to be a tonier version of a revenge thriller like Taken, while lacking even the thickheaded dedication to blundering its way through international conflicts. It’s not that The Amateur explores moral gray areas; it just swirls generic and weirdly apolitical spy-movie elements around until all that’s left is a watery blur, accidentally paying faithful tribute to studio mediocrities past.
Director: James Hawes
Writers: Ken Nolan, Gary Spinelli
Starring: Rami Malek, Laurence Fishburne, Caitríona Balfe, Rachel Brosnahan, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson
Release Date: April 11, 2025
