By Sandra Hall
THE AMATEUR
★★★★
M, 123 minutes. In cinemas
The fact that Rami Malek looks entirely unqualified to play an action hero is the point of The Amateur. As Charlie Heller, a nerdy CIA cryptographer, he’s thrust into the role by his urge to avenge the murder of his wife – an idea that attracts loud snorts of derision from his co-workers.
Rami Malek plays a nerdy CIA analyst out for revenge in The Amateur.Credit: John Wilson
The film is drawn from a 1981 novel by spy novelist Robert Littell. A former Newsweek correspondent based in Europe during the Cold War, Littell has been compared with both Graham Greene and Le Carre for the wit and the political insights to be found in his work. For that reason, it makes perfect sense that the film should be directed by James Hawes, who brought the first series of Mick Herron’s Slow Horses to the TV screen. When it comes to the art of marrying espionage with extreme cynicism, Herron is unlikely ever to find a rival.
In this film, however, the cynicism is dialled down. While the plot includes a group of rogue CIA agents engaged in black ops, the writers have extended a lot of compassion to Charlie, who is haunted by memories of his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), and the happiness they had together.
The film is a remake. The screenplay for the original was written by Littell himself, who knew quite a lot about cryptology from his time as a code officer in the US Navy but he and the movie’s producers fell out during the rewrites and he denounced the final result for its “truly awful dialogue”. I imagine that he’s more pleased with this version.
The mayhem begins when Sarah, a climate control campaigner in London for a conference, is taken hostage during a terrorist attack on her hotel and killed as the gang are shooting their way out.
A distraught Charlie then embarks on a hunt that takes him to London, Paris, Marseille and Istanbul, finally ending up on Russia’s Baltic coast. This could make for a travelogue with a side serve of suspense but Hawes has a taste for Europe’s grittier neighbourhoods and the settings give the action some intriguingly rough edges.
Charlie’s CIA bosses do everything they can to deter him from this peripatetic exercise but he comes up with an offer they can’t refuse and Laurence Fishburne, cast as a field agent trainer, is assigned to prepare him for the rigours ahead. It’s a job he takes on very reluctantly, for Charlie, he discovers, can’t shoot straight, panics in a fight and blunders into all kinds of trouble if he happens to get caught up in a chase, as often happens.
He does have a talent, however, for planning ingenious methods of cornering and trapping his prey. He can’t shoot them. Even when he can see them properly, he’s incapable of pulling the trigger. Instead, he employs a system of putting them in harm’s way and letting them do the rest.
Rami Malek and Caitriona Balfe use brain power to defeat the baddies in The Amateur.Credit: John Wilson
Malek gives a strangely compelling performance. It’s slightly stilted, as if he’s checking himself before he speaks, but somehow it’s right for Charlie, whose mind is probably taken up with algorithmic calculations much of the time. And fortunately, he has a strong supporting cast on hand to respond to his famously pop-eyed stare – although the best of them are wasted in small roles.
A shaggy-looking Jon Bernthal appears briefly as an affable field agent and Caitriona Balfe (Outlander) has a small but potent role as a mysterious Russian computer hacker who becomes Charlie’s closest ally, largely because she can understand what he’s talking about.
Some of the script is too clever for its own good – so convoluted that you’re not quite sure where it’s going – but it’s fun and, at times, surprisingly poignant.
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