If you’re anything like me you live in absolute terror of happiness. It’s a lonely, anxious, paranoid existence, and I blame movies like “The Amateur,” where a peaceful morning with your significant other — complete with delicious cups of coffee, colorful flowers on the kitchen table, and romantic kisses as you leave for a business trip — can mean only one thing: You are about to die, and you are about to die hard.
Less than one day after Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) goes to London, leaving her husband Charles (Rami Malek) behind, driving away as he runs alongside her car, practically screaming “I’m going to live forever!” in defiance of both The Fates and action movie logic, she gets murdered in a terrorist attack. Charles is devastated, as you can imagine. It’s harder to imagine him blackmailing his corrupt bosses into letting him go out in the field to kill his wife’s murderers personally, because it’s fundamentally ridiculous. But he does it anyway.
“The Amateur” takes place in a comforting fantasy universe where corrupt government officials actually worry that there will be consequences if their crimes are exposed to the Washington Post. These spy thrillers still cling to the idea that uncovering criminality in the highest echelons of government could lead to some kind of meaningful change, despite irrefutable modern evidence to the contrary. It’s like watching a movie where the whole plot centers on wearing white after Labor Day. “The Amateur” is practically quaint.
In any case, Charles gets what looks like one day of half-assed spy training from an embittered field agent named Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) before he goes on the lam, out in the cold, to brutally murder the people who are guilty of brutal murder. To “The Amateur’s” credit this is one of the rare thrillers that treats death like a real tragedy, arguing that Charles will lose a piece of his soul if he pulls the trigger. Then again it’s also the kind of movie that backtracks from this mentality and pretends that revenge actually does solve everything, so let’s not give it too much credit.
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The rest of “The Amateur” finds Charlie wandering Europe in search of bad guys who have only one or two character traits a piece. Bad Guy #1 is paranoid. Bad Guy #2 likes rooftop swimming pools. Bad Guy #3 has allergies and really likes bread, which I guess makes her the interesting one. To be fair they all have more personality than Charlie’s wife ever did. Her entire life was spent giving Charlie presents and asking him to join her on business trips. She was practically born to die, just to motivate a man to avenge her. That’s a little insulting.
“The Amateur” comes courtesy of director James Hawes, directing his second theatrical feature after the competent but mawkish World War II biopic “One Life,” and 25 years of solid TV shows like “Doctor Who” and “Slow Horses.” Hawes films his action with crisp, confident efficiency, which yields modest, unremarkable excitement. The narrative promise of a rank amateur doing Jason Bourne’s job is intriguing, and when Charles is sloppy about his work the film briefly perks up. But Charles is also a genius, so his inexperience with firearms doesn’t mean much to the film as a whole. The movie isn’t really about Charles being bad at this. The movie is about him being really good at it in a (slightly) unexpected way.
Indeed, by the end of “The Amateur” a CIA field agent played by Jon Bernthal suggests that Charles should quit his day job and become a real spy. It’s the type of scene that sticks out like a sore thumb, starring an actor who’s way too famous to only appear in two scenes — and briefly mentioned in a third — which never directly connect to the rest of the plot. One suspects that Bernthal’s cameo, and the unlikely survival of a character presumed dead, was either a reshoot or at least an afterthought, some kind of clunky and optimistic attempt to set up “The Amateur 2” (even though you’d probably have to change the name to “Semi-Pro”).
“The Amateur” isn’t a bad movie, it’s just a mediocre one. Its baseline competence is perfectly watchable. It’s just hard to imagine anyone signing onto this project with the explicitly stated goal of only making it watchable. Malek is in top form: his hangdog expression, unassuming demeanor and faraway eyes give Charles the appearance of depth and complexity, even when the screenplay fails him. Everyone else might as well be on autopilot. Julianne Nicholson shows up as the new CIA director, but she’s more of a plot point than a person, so her job is to use her immense talent to infuse this nothing role with a little gravitas. Mission accomplished.
A 20th Century Studios release, “The Amateur” opens in theaters on Friday, April 11.