the Amateur

There are films that greet you with noise and bravado, and then there are films like The Amateur, which begin in a whisper - a slow smoldering of grief, paranoia and strange determination. You go into this movie expecting an elegant spy thriller, maybe even a Jason Bourne-type movie about a tech nerd turned assassin. What you get instead was something far messier, more melancholy, and more thoughtful. The director James Hawes, known for his meticulous work on Slow The amateur is part character study, part old-fashioned spy drama and part slow-burning emotional reckoning. Rami Malek plays Charlie Heller, a man defined as much by his silence as by his obsession, and the result is a film that dwells not on action, but on grief.

There is an early scene that sets the tone for the movie, in which Charlie is alone, sitting in the garage next to a half-restored vintage airplane, the kind of project you take on when you think you're going to grow old with someone. Sarah, his wife (played with grace and criminally underused by Rachel Brosnahan), had given it to him. A puzzle for my puzzle, she had written on a note. This phrase becomes a kind of ghost throughout the film. We see Charlie trying to decode his pain through violence, code, manipulation and disorientation - his nocturnal forays into the darkest corners of the CIA are not so much acts of revenge as desperate attempts to keep Sarah present in a world that has already moved on. The film makes it clear: he is not a born killer. He is a man who has spent his life hiding behind computers and crossword puzzles, and when the only person who understood his strangeness suddenly disappears, he is left with only the tools he was not supposed to use in this way.

The question is not whether Charlie will succeed in her mission of revenge, but whether it will have meaning once it is over. Rami Malek, with his haunted eyes and unpredictable rhythms, delves into the character's vulnerability. His physical awkwardness is never erased, and director James Hawes wisely resists the temptation to turn him into a slick action figure. Instead, we have a spy thriller where the scenes unfold more like anxiety-inducing dreams: awkwardly manipulated keyholes, YouTube tutorials in the middle of a mission, improvised gadgets that resemble the last resort of a man trying to overcome his own emotional breakdown. Even the murders - some of them shockingly creative, including one involving a pollen-filled containment chamber that borders on Final Destination in its invention - feel more like strange mathematical problems solved under duress than moments of triumph. Liam's performance doesn't shine brightly, but it is deeply internal, and sometimes uncomfortable to watch in a good way. He carries the weight of the film like a man wearing someone else's coat: it doesn't quite fit, but he's too cold to take it off.

The structure of the film, however, resembles a tug-of-war between something profound and something commercial. It's as if James Hawes and screenwriters Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli wanted to strike a balance between Munich and The Equalizer, and the result is a slightly uneven hybrid, elegant at times, surprisingly conventional at others. When the movie is set from Charlie's fractured perspective, following him through dimly lit hotels in Marseille, dark beaches in Istanbul and the gray bureaucratic corridors of Langley, it buzzes with unease. Martin Ruhe's photography is clinical but evocative, often using wide shots to isolate Charlie in vast, indifferent spaces, suggesting a man more hunted by his thoughts than by the actual CIA agents following him. Volker Bertelmann's soundtrack adds a heartbeat to it all, pulsing with synthetic dread, drawing the camera deeper into Charlie's orbit.

Jon Bernthal appears as The Bear, a field agent whose name promises narrative meat, but who ends up tasting like a cold side dish. His scenes seem added on rather than organic. The same can be said of Julianne Nicholson as CIA director Elizabeth O'Brien, whose gravitas is undeniable, but whose role is defined more by her presence than by her decisions. Laurence Fishburne fares better as Charlie's gruff boss, a mix of disillusioned mentor and Greek chorus, muttering warnings about the cost of death. Their scenes together are among the richest in the film, not because of the action but because of the stillness: one man who has done terrible things teaches another how to do them badly.

There is also a dissonance in the way the film depicts international espionage. For a story that crosses Europe by plane - from London to Paris via the shores of the Baltic - the cities never seem to be inhabited. They are beautiful, certainly, and sometimes thrilling (the sequence of the glass-roofed swimming pool deserves the hype it has received), but Charlie moves through them like a ghost. No inhabitants, no textures, no flavor. It's not a deal breaker, but it does dull the edges. These cities become faceless backdrops for an otherwise specific and emotionally granular story. A little more grime, a few moments of human chaos more rooted in reality - a panicked crowd, a noisy café, a local cop asking too many questions - might have made the stakes feel more real.

But where The Amateur fails as a globetrotting thriller, it makes up for with a strange emotion. There is a moment that comes out of nowhere: Charlie is lying on a bed, opposite another character who has also lost someone. I just want to sleep next to someone again, she says. No sex, no innuendo. Just two people trying to make the world feel less empty for one night. It's this kind of moment - quiet, unassuming, painfully honest - that sets the pace of the film. We are so used to tales of revenge that fetishize justice that we forget how grief really feels. The Amateur does not always remain faithful to this emotional truth - there are shootings and explosions - but it never loses sight of the wound at the heart of the story.

There is surely a version of this movie that feels like a limited series. The subplots demand space to breathe: the infighting of the CIA, the ethics of drone warfare, the hollow patriotism that conceals political opportunism. The movie touches on all these topics, but in passing. It alludes to the big questions - what does justice look like when filtered through bureaucracy? Can revenge heal or does it only reproduce the pain? - but it often favors plot over philosophy. And yet, despite its contradictions and half-developed plots, The Amateur deserves its place among the best films of the “reluctant assassin” genre. It's not as elegant as The Bourne Identity or as moving as Munich, but it bears its imperfections like bruises, and in doing so, it becomes more memorable than many of its peers in the genre.

The final confrontation at sea is more about dialogue than explosions, and it becomes clear that it was never about creating a new action franchise. Charlie Heller has no slogan. He has no heroic music. He doesn't even have an ending. What he does get is something far rarer: a chance to look in the mirror and realize that revenge hasn't healed him. That he is still broken. That maybe we all are. And that's where The Amateur quietly excels. It may be built from familiar elements, but it refuses to offer catharsis as a product. Instead, it leaves you with something heavier: the question of what grief makes us capable of - and whether we can live with the answers.

The Amateur
Directed by James Hawes
Written by Ken Nolan, Gary Spinelli
Based on The Amateur by Robert Littell
Produced by Hutch Parker, Dan Wilson, Rami Malek, Joel B. Michaels
Starring Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Laurence Fishburne, Caitríona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg
Cinematography: Martin Ruhe
Edited by Jonathan Amos
Music by Volker Bertelmann
Production company: Hutch Parker Entertainment
Distributed by 20th Century Studios (United States), The Walt Disney Company France (France)
Release date: April 9, 2025 (France), April 11, 2025 (United States)
Running time: 123 minutes

Screened on April 7, 2025 at Gaumont Disney Village, Theater 19, seat A19

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