‘The Amateur’ Review: A Spy Thriller That Talks Big but Moves Small

Rami Malek opens “The Amateur” already looking like a man half-buried under grief, twitchy, haunted, always a little too deep in his own head. His Charlie Heller, a codebreaker for the CIA, is less James Bond than an IT guy with a grudge, forced into action when his wife is killed in a terrorist attack. It’s not unlike his Elliot Alderson from “Mr. Robot,” but here, Charlie isn’t guiding us through techno-anarchist rabbit holes. He’s simply trying to make sense of his wife’s death, and what to do with the anger that follows. The idea has promise: what if the quietest guy in the room took up arms? What if grief could override fear?

Unfortunately, you already know the answers to those questions once you’ve seen films of the same verve from years past.

Charlie Heller: A Nerd with a Gun

Directed by James Hawes and written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, “The Amateur” wants to be a high-minded spy thriller with a personal edge. Loosely adapted from Robert Littell’s 1981 novel of the same name, it runs on vibes and actor goodwill, boasting of the structure of something sharp—globe-hopping settings, a conspiracy in the wings, a vengeance-driven lead—but which never hits the nerve. The film sets the board for a morally thorny revenge story—and then proceeds to play the safest, most predictable game possible. 

The setup is standard-issue revenge fare. Charlie, a desk-bound analyst with a fear of flying and a penchant for puzzles, loses his wife in what the CIA insists was a terrorist attack. Before everything goes to hell, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) gives him an old Cessna plane as a gift, a loving push toward facing his fear of flying. It’s a sweet, symbolic gesture, something to coax him out of his shell. But like most things in Charlie’s life, it ends up gathering dust. The man would rather deal with puzzles than people, and the plane becomes a quiet reminder of everything he avoids: risk, action, momentum.

When Sarah is killed in a terrorist attack in London, Charlie’s passive world cracks. He learns, through a conveniently timed data drop from an anonymous source (Caitríona Balfe, doing what she can with what she’s given), that the bombing may have covered up a CIA-initiated drone strike. When his higher-ups shrug off his pleas for justice, Charlie does what any fictional husband with a dead wife and access to surveillance software would do. The analyst goes rogue.

A Globetrotting Action Without a Real Pulse

Once Charlie’s boots hit foreign soil, the film settles into a familiar routine: exotic city, shady contact, one bad guy down, on to the next. There are no real surprises here; even the most audacious kill, involving a rooftop pool and a scuba rig, was spoiled in the film’s promotional trailer.

There’s also a curious lack of tension. We’re never really in danger with Charlie, because the plot is always three steps ahead of us. A film like this should feel like a code we’re solving alongside its protagonist. Instead, “The Amateur” lays out the entire string of moves, then executes them, dutifully and without friction.

The emotional stakes—his wife, his grief, his disillusionment—are all declared, not developed. Sarah “mattered,” Charlie keeps saying. But the film doesn’t give her much to do beyond flashbacks and quirky gifts. Even her death feels like a narrative necessity more than a gut punch. We’re told to care. Yet, we’re not given reasons to.

It’s the sort of premise that could lean either into pulp or into pathos. But “The Amateur” doesn’t really choose. It gives us a couple of mood-lit monologues and some blood-splattered poetic justice, but mostly it leans back on plot points that feel drawn from a grab bag of every modern spy movie you’ve seen in the past fifteen years. This is a film that makes a big deal of a lock-picking scene Charlie learns from YouTube—charming, sure—then pivots into a globe-spanning revenge tour so cleanly choreographed it loses any real sense of danger.

Malek’s Committed Performance Almost Offsets the Film’s Shortcomings

Malek, to his credit, commits. He’s refined the art of the awkward genius—part loner, part savant—and here he cranks it all the way up. There’s a nice (if undercooked) contrast between Charlie’s coiled nervousness and the hard-nosed mentorship of Laurence Fishburne’s Robert Henderson. Fishburne brings exactly the grounded weight you’d want in this kind of role, but he’s one of many actors the movie doesn’t quite know what to do with.

And that’s what really stings here. “The Amateur” has so much firepower that it leaves on the bench. The scenes between Fishburne and Malek crackle with the only real texture in the film. Charlie’s twitchy, borderline-neurotic energy clashes beautifully with Henderson’s gravel-and-steel authority. But just as their dynamic begins to matter, the film veers away, letting that potential trail off. On the other hand, Jon Bernthal, all charm and muscle as field agent “The Bear,” is barely in the film. So is Michael Stuhlbarg, criminally wasted in a role that should’ve been at least memorable, if not defining.

Those aren’t the only missed opportunities. Balfe’s Inquiline is another afterthought: a character positioned to be crucial to Charlie’s mission, but written with all the urgency of a footnote. Even Brosnahan, who lends genuine warmth in her limited flashbacks, is boxed into the thankless wife-as-motivation role. The film insists Sarah mattered; but aside from a quirky gift and a tragic exit, we know almost nothing about her. The emotional stakes are there, but they’re written in shorthand.

If you’re going to stack your cast like a prestige drama, you should probably let them do more than act as expository furniture. The filmmakers’ cluelessness about what to do with such a cast speaks volumes about their bargain-bin priorities.

The Neeson Effect in Full Swing

Which brings us to what might be the movie’s most interesting—and most frustrating—legacy: its place in the growing trend of what I refer to as the Neeson-ification of serious actors. Ever since “Taken“ rebranded Liam Neeson as a grizzled action star, studios have been applying the formula to actors from outside the genre to slip into the role of the reluctant vigilante. 

Malek is the latest name to take the bait, joining a club that includes the likes of Guy Pearce (“Lockout”), Dylan O’Brien (“American Assassin”), Ethan Hawke (“24 Hours to Live”), Bob Odenkirk (“Nobody“), Sean Penn (“The Gunman”)—the list goes on. The common thread? Big-swing casting, middling stories. These films rarely earn their own weight. Instead, they bank on the novelty of watching someone who doesn’t “look” like an action hero become one. Sometimes the gamble pays off. Other times, like here, it feels more like a branding exercise than a character study.

To his credit, Malek holds the center. After all, the actor is no stranger to playing the outsider. What’s frustrating is how little the script lets him be one. He’s fully committed, and he sells the contrast between Charlie’s introversion and the world of espionage he’s plunged into. But the film leans too heavily on his presence to compensate for a story that’s all outline and no flesh. Instead of subverting the revenge-thriller template, “The Amateur” dutifully checks every box. The quirks that make Charlie unique slowly dissolve until he’s just another guy with a grudge and an itinerary.

And really, all this makes the movie less like one and more like a case study of the Neeson Effect.

‘The Amateur:’ A Flight Path Too Familiar

To be clear, “The Amateur” isn’t terrible. The camera moves with confidence, Volker Bertelmann’s score hits the right moody notes, and you’re never truly bored. But there’s a difference between not being bored and being pulled in. This is a movie that mistakes clarity for momentum, structure for soul. It looks like a smart film. It sounds like a serious film. But it moves like a checklist.

When compared to the source material by Robert Littell, this latest adaptation takes those ideas and sands down the edges. Hawes’ version swaps in sleek locations and fast cuts, but strips away the soul. The drone-strike conspiracy is background noise. The ethical dilemmas are half-formed, the emotion prepackaged. It’s clean, glossy, and entirely predictable; a thriller with no real thrill, a mystery with no suspense.

Charlie’s fear of flying—and the Cessna parked like a metaphor in a barn—is one of the film’s few interesting through-lines. It’s meant to show how much he’s changed, how far he’s come. But just as Charlie learns to take the controls, the film loses its own. And by the time he faces off against his final target (in a sequence that should’ve landed with emotional weight but instead plays out like a very expensive shrug) it becomes obvious that “The Amateur” isn’t here to challenge the genre or expand it. It’s here to cash the check. And maybe—just maybe—launch another serious actor into action-star orbit.

But as Malek pilots that old Cessna into the closing credits, there’s one thing I know for certain: At least Elliot Alderson would’ve made things weird.

James Hawes’ “The Amateur” was released in the United States by 20th Century Studios on April 11, 2025. Follow us for more coverage.