My Corner

April 2025

Sitting through The Amateur felt like staring into a puddle where a reflection should appear, waiting for some ripple of life, some glimmer of meaning, or at the very least some cinematic personality to emerge from the fog of grayscale visuals and monotonous spy genre beats, but instead, the film played out like a flatline on a heart monitor, a story that believes it carries pulse-quickening stakes yet never manages to convince viewers that anyone involved cared enough to inject tension, humor, or danger into its formulaic plot.

Rami Malek portrays Charles Heller with a hollow-eyed intensity that reads less as grief-stricken rage and more as exhausted confusion, a man apparently motivated by the murder of his wife Sarah, though Rachel Brosnahan’s fleeting appearance as Sarah in one domestic flashback conveys so little dimensionality that audiences could be forgiven for wondering whether Heller’s motivations arise from love, guilt, paranoia, or simply the script’s desperate need to manufacture pathos in a narrative devoid of organic emotional arcs.

Director James Hawes constructs each scene with a muted, murky palette of grays and olive greens, draining the world of color and light until London, Prague, and Berlin become indistinguishable concrete slabs upon which Malek shuffles from safe house to embassy to nondescript parking garage, always framed in static mid-shots or over-the-shoulder perspectives that create the unsettling impression of watching a training module rather than an espionage thriller with narrative propulsion or cinematic imagination.

The screenplay sets up potentially fascinating ethical dilemmas about drone strikes, black sites, and covert disinformation, but each promising provocation is either dropped entirely or reduced to a single line of expository dialogue before the film returns to following Heller’s stumble toward vengeance, accompanied by Laurence Fishburne’s character Henderson, who drifts in and out of scenes like a weary spirit guide tasked with bestowing assassin wisdom upon a protagonist who never once feels capable of handling a firearm, let alone orchestrating a global revenge campaign.

Action sequences, though limited, arrive with such a perfunctory sense of staging that even a shootout in a glass skyscraper conference room carries no visceral charge, only the bland inevitability of characters ducking, shooting, and running in carefully choreographed motions that somehow still manage to appear sloppily edited, never offering the kinetic catharsis that spy thrillers from Skyfall to Atomic Blonde have taught viewers to crave.

The script’s philosophical core is undermined by Malek’s performance, which favors off-kilter tics and stoic silence over vulnerability or moral complexity, creating a protagonist who elicits neither empathy nor fascination, merely the cold curiosity one reserves for strangers encountered on the subway whose interior lives remain opaque behind vacant stares and jittery hands.

Even Julianne Nicholson and Michael Stuhlbarg, actors capable of wringing nuance and tension from the most perfunctory lines, appear utterly wasted, drifting through scenes as if contractually obligated to appear but free from any responsibility to imbue their intelligence-officer roles with menace, cunning, or that subtle theatrical relish great character actors often bring to disposable genre fare.

As the credits rolled and the final chord of the dirge-like score faded, the only sensation I carried from The Amateur was the realization that a film about a grief-consumed data analyst transforming into a vengeful field operative could have explored the devastating psychology of obsession and moral erosion, but instead delivered a lifeless, ponderous, self-serious pseudo-thriller so devoid of cinematic craft or thematic purpose that the only mystery left unsolved is why anyone thought this project was worth producing in the first place.