If The Amateur is what happens when “Mr. Robot” and “Jason Bourne” cross DNA with too little care for the ugly offspring, this is a child born of genre cliché and laughs in the face of plausibility. Call it Mr. Squirrel: The Euro-Tour of Absurdity, Rami Malek’s twitchy everyman hacking government files by day and unmasked terrorism by night, in a world where Interpol has apparently decided to go on holiday, the CIA chases its own tail, and not a single Parisian security official or Spanish detective can be bothered to even blink at an American cryptographer detonating pools and bodies in their midst.
Suspension of disbelief? The movie fairly dares you to try: “How many international atrocities can a bug-eyed programmer commit in daylight before someone blinks?” (Answer: The sky is apparently the limit.) The audience sits there, clutching their popcorn, as Rami Malek’s Charlie openly stalks through train stations and luxury hotels, passport and glowering visage plainly visible, CCTV cameras whirring, but those banks of screens, manned by sleepwalking continental police forces, are as unresponsive as the script. In France, he’s complicit in a woman being run down in the street and nobody bats an eyelid, not even a single huffy, beret-wearing gendarme to offer a Gallic shrug.
The film’s coup de grâce of mystery has our noodle-armed hero blowing high-tech glass swimming-pools sky high in Madrid, a set-piece presumably conceived during an especially lazy afternoon with a stack of John le Carré novels and absolutely no concern for whether anyone outside of Fishburne’s CIA mentor gives chase. (By the way, who set up the explosives? Did they FedEx him a bomb-starter kit, or is Charlie moonlighting as a one-man Mission: Impossible crew?) What of the aftermath, the rain of glass, the torn bodies? No locals, no Interpol, not even a sternly-worded hotel invoice to mar Charlie’s unperturbed passage from atrocity to atrocity. Our everyman is neither covered in the guilty sweat of panic nor the blood of true moral consequence, he’s just off to ride the next train, another anonymous face among the tourists, his own reflected in every security lens and nobody, nobody, lifts a finger.
Perhaps all this could be forgiven, a genre’s required shrug at realism, if the emotional core, the “avenge my wife!” through-line, weren’t as hollow and affectless as Malek’s perpetual thousand-yard stare. Is it unfair to say he resembles a squirrel in a panic attack, eyes bulging, hands twitchy, even at moments that should carry real weight? The opening scenes with his wife are cold, almost mechanical, the kind of acting that makes you wish for a malfunctioning AI from a better movie to step in and emote. Her death registers as a narrative checkpoint, not a gut punch, and Malek’s brittle sobbing leaves the viewer on the outside looking in, a cipher crying for a cipher.
Jon Bernthal appears (blink and you’ll miss him), his entire role distilled to a shot of testosterone, a bit of “hey we’re doing a spy movie!” cool badly in need of a real reason to exist. The supporting cast, stacked with pros, Caitríona Balfe, Michael Stuhlbarg, Julianne Nicholson, do their best to breathe oxygen into the vacuum, but the film is too busy ticking off globe-trotting locations and sub-par chase sequences to give them space.
You want to care. The bones of the story, grief curdled into vengeance, the lone amateur in the shark pool of professionals, have worked before, and could again, if the film didn’t treat its audience like it was the one with memory holes and attention deficit. Every plot “twist” is telegraphed five scenes early. Every emotional beat lands with a thud.
What’s most staggering is the movie’s imperviousness to consequence. Perhaps this is intended, a satire of contemporary intelligence bureaucracies, a deadpan commentary on the impotence of authority? (If so, it’s the deadest of deadpans, and I didn’t hear the joke.) In the end, after all this carnage and international uproar, Charlie simply restores an old plane and takes off into the sunset, no one left to pursue, no emotion left to feel, no laws apparently left to break.
The Amateur is the kind of film that asks you to play along and then punishes you for doing so. It scrapes by on the fumes of better movies and the hope that you’ll mistake fatigue or confusion for intrigue. After the movie I felt neither horrified nor amused; just stranded in the flat shadows between mediocrity and disaster. If the best thrillers haunt your nerves and linger in memory, this one fades before you’ve gotten the taste of popcorn out of your mouth.
