1981's The Amateur was an early entry in the wave of '80s Cold War thrillers that simultaneously exploited both the public's growing interest and general ignorance of computers. Rather than a James Bond figure, the protagonist was a nerdy codebreaker who becomes a proto MacGyver, using brains rather than brawn to seek revenge for the killing of his wife by terrorists. The use of technology in the movie was absolute hokum, but 1981 audiences simply didn't know any better and assumed that maybe an arcade machine could be reconstituted as a code-breaking device.
Now that we all carry more computing power in our pockets than the Pentagon had access to in 1981, it's become virtually impossible for movies to fool us with ramshackle depictions of technology. As such, this second adaptation of Robert Littell's source novel struggles with its basic setup. The (anti?)hero is still a socially awkward, code-breaking boffin, but he never actually deploys any convincing use of technology in his quest for vengeance. Preferring to blow his enemies to pieces with IEDs, this version of The Amateur might as well have been set in 1981, were it not for the intrusion of modern mass surveillance.
A miscast Rami Malek (barely awake and impersonating John Malkovich) is Charlie Heller, a decoder who works in the bowels of Langley. Via an anonymous source, Heller learns that his boss, the CIA's deputy director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany), has been ordering drone strikes on civilian targets and framing them as suicide bombings. Heller decides to keep quiet about this knowledge until his wife (Rachel Brosnahan in a thankless role constructed around cheesy flashbacks) is executed by terrorists during a business trip to London. Unhappy with Moore's reluctance to go after the terrorists, Heller blackmails his boss into allowing him to hunt down his wife's killers himself, following some rigorous but largely ineffectual training at the hands of the gruff Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne).
Once Heller finds himself in Europe, The Amateur becomes indistinguishable from the scores of espionage thrillers it's tailing. The influence of the Jason Bourne movies is writ large, with the CIA tracking Heller on his path to vengeance and the obligatory female companion in the form of a Russian defector played by Caitriona Balfe with a terrible accent (when will Hollywood figure out that they have actors in Eastern Europe?). But what's sorely lacking are the sort of cleverly constructed set-pieces that earned The Bourne Identity and its first two sequels such acclaim. There's little in the way of action here, and what we do get is thoroughly unconvincing (a car chase ends when Heller's pursuers simply give up for no discernible reason).
Perhaps The Amateur's biggest issue is that it focusses on the least interesting of two storylines. We care less about Heller taking out the terrorists than we do about the CIA being brought to justice. The terrorists kill two people, while we're told Moore's duplicitous drone strikes have claimed the lives of thousands of innocents. The latter subplot is barely present, relegated to a couple of scenes in which the head of the CIA (a wasted Julianne Nicholson) interrogates Moore. We may not see any of his victims, but with Heller setting off explosive devices in crowded areas of major European cities, it's likely that by the end of the movie he's killed far more innocents than the terrorists (shades of Zack Snyder's Superman causing more destruction to Metropolis than General Zod in Man of Steel).
Lurching from one location to another and from scene to scene, The Amateur has the rocky editing rhythms of a film that has been badly butchered from a longer cut. Surely Jon Bernthal's macho field operative played a bigger role in some earlier cut, rather than what amounts to a cameo here. A subplot from the 1981 film that saw Christopher Plummer sport a laughable fake mustache to play a Russian professor is absent here, but the Wikipedia page lists the actor Takehiro Hira in the role, which suggests it was awkwardly excised at some point. Perhaps that's why The Amateur seems to be missing some key scenes, and why you'll find yourself wondering if you missed something more than once over the course of its two hours.
The '81 film was a pretty bog standard thriller, but at least it was a movie, using images to tell its story. The best parts of that film were those that concentrated on the process of its smarty pants protagonist putting everything in place, with extended silent scenes of Heller assembling various doohickeys and creating traps. In this new version we never see any of Heller's work, rather he simply tells us how clever he is after the fact (when Heller tells a baddy that he's rigged an elevated swimming pool with explosives, we're left to ask "How?"). It's a striking example of how today's Hollywood writers no longer care about the golden storytelling rule of "show, don't tell."
Directed by: James Hawes
Starring: Rami Malek, Laurence Fishburne, Rachel Brosnahan, Caitríona Balfe, Jon Bernthal, Michael Stuhlbarg, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson
