The Ama­teur review – extreme­ly sol­id, extreme­ly unspectacular

Imag­ine The Bourne Iden­ti­ty but Jason Bourne is a base­ment-dwelling weeb. Rami Malek stars as that weeb in James Hawes’ blithe­ly under­whelm­ing espi­onage time-pass­er, The Ama­teur. Char­lie Heller is a spec­cy CIA data encryp­tion oper­a­tive whose idyl­lic wife (Rachel Bros­na­han) is whacked by inter­na­tion­al ter­ror­ists while on a work away-day in Lon­don. Rather than just be allowed to stew in his lit­tle win­dow­less office on floor minus 5 of the CIA HQ in Lan­g­ley, he decides he wants to man up and – all togeth­er now! – off the men who bru­tal­ly exe­cut­ed his oth­er half.

Ini­tial­ly he’s laughed out of the room by brawny high­er-ups who are play­ing their own black-ops games and insti­gat­ing secret wars in the name of Amer­i­can secu­ri­ty. But the threat of blow­ing the whis­tle gets Char­lie out of the build­ing and into a field agent train­ing pro­gramme with old hand Col Hen­der­son (Lau­rence Fish­burne; think Mor­pheus in car­go pants). While our key­board hero is no good when it comes to the phys­i­cal and moral act of shoot­ing to kill, his siz­able IQ makes him a dab hand when it comes to impro­vised explo­sives and dig­i­tal trac­ing tech­nol­o­gy, and so off he trots on a tour of con­ti­nen­tal Europe to find some elab­o­rate­ly-mount­ed retribution.

Based on a 1981 work by vet­er­an spy nov­el­ist Robert Lit­tell, The Ama­teur plays like a stan­dard-issue tech thriller where Char­lie is some­how able to bug or hack any device for his own advan­tage. If you’re wear­ing a Fit­bit, he can make your arm blow up. OK, so that’s maybe over­stretch­ing it a lit­tle, but it’s a film where the dra­mat­ic stakes are mas­sive­ly decreased due to this over­whelm­ing dig­i­tal omnipo­tence, where the ten­sion in every scene dis­si­pates once you realise that Charlie’s already locked in some jig­gary-pok­er on his lap­top beforehand. 

There’s an air of seri­ous­ness to pro­ceed­ings, which ends up mak­ing some of the more exot­ic modes of death rather tonal­ly con­spic­u­ous. One ter­ror­ist mark is trapped inside an oxy­gen tank and her severe aller­gies are used against her with the cru­el admin­is­ter­ing of excess pollen into her sys­tem. There’s anoth­er set-piece that’ll have you shift­ing away from the infin­i­ty pools in deluxe hotels, espe­cial­ly since we’re shown how easy it is to make them col­lapse (all you need is a Hen­ry Hoover).

Malek’s icy per­for­mance does lit­tle to endear the view­er to Char­lie, while his ultra-tac­tile rela­tion­ship with his wife – pre­sent­ed in gauzy flash­backs – nev­er feels entire­ly authen­tic. And once you’ve got­ten past the ​“lit­tle nerd who can” con­ceit, there’s very lit­tle here to chew on.