The Amateur Is A Solid Throwback Spy Thriller — For Better And For Worse
Rami Malek stars in a vigilante spy thriller that feels like it was made during his Mr. Robot heyday.
It was 2016. Mr. Robot was one of the smartest, most thrilling shows on TV, and Rami Malek — with his twitchy, nervous lead performance — was one of our most unique TV stars. It felt like Malek was about to blow up, and a year later, he did, with his Oscar-winning performance in Bohemian Rhapsody. That’s when Malek moved up from being one of our strangest TV stars to being one of our strangest movie stars, as Hollywood tried to figure out how to cast him. He was the forgettable villain of a Bond movie, then competed for screen time in large ensembles in David O. Russell and Christopher Nolan movies. But none of these roles felt like they really tapped into the twitchy weirdness that made Malek a star in Mr. Robot.
It took until 2025 for a movie to finally try to cater itself toward Malek. In the muted spy thriller The Amateur, Malek’s first starring vehicle since Bohemian Rhapsody, tries to mold a Jason Bourne-esque narrative around his particular brand of antisocial weirdo — and it sort of succeeds.
Helmed by stalwart British TV director James Hawes, The Amateur follows Malek’s Charles Heller, a CIA cryptographer who has gotten used to being overlooked and underestimated at his workplace. But he’s happily in love with his patient wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), who is about to leave for a work trip to London. But when Sarah is murdered in a terror attack, Charles is shocked and enraged at the CIA’s inaction. Discovering a cover-up of unsanctioned operations by CIA Deputy Director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), Charles blackmails Moore into giving him CIA training and resources so that he can personally hunt down his wife’s murderers. Finding that he can’t quite nail the standard training given to him by CIA operative Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), Charles goes after his wife’s murderers in his own way, using his particular set of hacking skills to create wildly elaborate murder traps.
The Amateur has been in the works for a while, with Hugh Jackman originally lined up to star in the project back in 2006. Malek’s version was announced in 2023, but you can imagine this iteration was conceived and shot all around 2016-ish, before Malek really blew up post-Bohemian Rhapsody — or at least, in a pop culture vacuum where Malek was only ever known for Mr. Robot. The Amateur, for better or for worse, feels like it was tailored specifically for Malek’s Mr. Robot-era persona, with Charles’ personality feeling like a slightly evolved, slightly less mentally unsound version of Elliot Alderson. It’s a refreshing change from the various other “analyst-turned-spy” thrillers à la Jack Ryan, which turn their heroes into natural badasses — Charles is undeniably bad at being a spy when he first embarks on his vigilante revenge mission and makes some easy mistakes until he figures out what works for him. But it’s what makes Malek’s performance stand out in a mostly sturdy, largely generic spy thriller.
The Amateur makes use of Malek’s particular set of skills.
Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s script unfolds like a reworked Jason Bourne story, with its conspiracy that goes all the way to the top of the CIA and its scrappy hero forced to evade the authorities and rely on his more clandestine allies. But there’s a charm to its no-frills, throwback vibes, even if its breathless depiction of the surveillance state, and all the paranoid tech thrills that come from it, would’ve felt outdated back when the project was first conceived back in 2006. However, like Malek, it’s the murderer’s row of character actors filling up the ensemble that elevate The Amateur from its standard spy-thriller trappings and make it a surprisingly enjoyable watch.
McCallany and Fishburne, in particular, make for great heavies against Malek’s more cerebral hero — McCallany is all salt-of-the-earth machismo, while Fishburne puts a gruffer, more amiable spin on the wise mentor-type he perfected in The Matrix. The chemistry between Fishburne and Malek is also surprisingly sweet; you could almost see the seeds being planted for a three-movie franchise in their brief interactions.
There are a handful of fun “those guys” appearances from character actors like Jon Bernthal and Michael Stuhlbarg, with Bernthal obviously on a break from filming Daredevil: Born Again while Stuhlbarg gets to do his best mustache-twirling in an icy villain role. But the women of the cast are sadly a little underutilized — Caitríona Balfe gets dealt the best hand with a meatier role as Charles’ ex-KGB ally, but Julianne Nicholson mostly gets to play stick-in-the-mud as the stern CIA director, while Brosnahan is stuck playing the beatific memory of Sarah, eternally clad in breezy sundresses.
Malek and Fishburne strike up a surprising chemistry in The Amateur.
While it is admirable that The Amateur aspires to form a Bourne-tier franchise around a weirdo like Malek’s Charles Heller, it still feels like a halfway effort — director James Hawes is too attached to the explosive thrills of making an action blockbuster. If it went a little weirder and less mainstream, The Amateur might’ve stood out more than it does. But for all its flaws and generic twists, The Amateur is a surprisingly enjoyable throwback thriller that finally makes use of one of our most unusual movie stars.
