“The Amateur” (2025) Review

Theoretically, The Amateur offers a refreshing subversion of the globe-trotting action-spy thriller genre. Instead of casting a beefy tough guy who can shoot guns and kill easily, this film casts Rami Malek as a wiry guy who can barely hold a pistol and is highly hesitant to pull the trigger. His character is smart enough to build a bomb, making this thriller more a case of brain over brawn. In small doses, the film does have some of those smarts. For the most part, however, it falls back on many familiar ingredients without much extra spice of humanity amid its tactile intriciacies.

Malek is perfectly cast in the role of Charles Heller, a CIA cryptographer established from the first scene as someone who loves to tinker. Two sinister events send him over the edge and going against his organization. The first is the death of his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), gunned down in a terrorist attack. The second is the discovery of forged reports of terrorist attacks by CIA director Alex Moore (Holt McCallany). Fed up with a world protecting the scummiest of people, Charles decides to track down the terrorists himself and kill them. The only problem is that Charles has no experience in killing people, and the experienced CIA agent Henderson (Laurence Fishburne) can only teach him so much. This leads to the meek vigilante devising clever ways to execute his targets as creatively as he avoids detection and creates distractions along the way, trying to avoid the CIA and lay traps for the terrorists.

Some of Charles’s kills are unique in how he tries to suffocate people with their allergies and make a swimming target become a victim of pressure, glass, and gravity. While the film does favor the marvels of the moving parts, the few times it slows down to focus on the more human components fall flat. Charles’s grief over his wife is relegated to the bog-standard ghostly hallucinations of her lingering presence. His internal struggle with taking lives is informed with plentiful platitudes by Fishburne about not being able to take back murder. The many allies and informants he meets along the way, ranging from a Turkish spy played by Caitríona Balfe to a confident field agent played by Jon Bernthal, come and go without payoff beyond getting Charles to his next target. That said, it was nice to see Bernthal in a role where he’s offered up as the tempting safety that Malek rejects. It’d be a great subversion if the film didn’t already have so many petering-out arcs and quirks, where the bookending prospect of Charlie building a plane is rarely given much flight.

So much of this picture’s creativity is also hampered by keeping the audience so far in the dark that you won’t see most of its surprises coming. Pacing-wise, the film might’ve been compelling in how quickly it spirals with Charlie’s surprising tactics of data-wiping printer codes, bugging the CIA, and hacking surveillance footage. Yet, few of these intelligent moves shock all that much for how little Charlie has his plans thrown off. For a film that wants to frame this guy as the underdog, he sure seems to have his priorities fully in check by the third act, regarding technical tinkering and moral grounding for his revenge. He knows exactly what he’s going to do and how he will do it, coming off more like an expert-level James Bond villain without a James Bond to best him.

The Amateur is a smart idea trapped inside a routine spy thriller, where theatrics and tech twists can only carry it so far. On paper, I want to champion this film so badly for making the protagonist less of a brawler, bound by crucial tech skills to take down his targets. But somehow, the film never entirely takes off with this concept, getting more lost in the bluster of its action and set pieces to feel more rote than it should. Malek was a wise choice for this role, but his character is so enduring that he deserves a better journey than one laced with the same stone path as action heroes with bigger muscles. This picture comes so close to being something more, but ultimately ends up trading in most of its greater potential for a sufficient spy thriller thrust into the Goldilock’s zone of not too complex and not too dumb.