by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $13.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Rami Malek, Rachel Brosnahan, Laurence Fishburne, Jon Bernthal, Holt McCallany, Michael Stuhlbarg
Intro:
There’s compelling material here, both right at the front and between the margins, and those looking for another Mr. Robot fix of socially distant keyboard shenanigans will certainly get their fill.
After earning a respectable hit with the moving, well-acted, ‘your Nan loves this film’ One Life, director James Hawes’ follow-up takes that same notion of a man doing what he feels must be done and pushing it into a much darker direction.
Written by Ken Nolan (Black Hawk Down) and Gary Spinelli (American Made), adapting the Robert Littell novel of the same name, The Amateur is a different breed than most modern action-oriented revenge thrillers. While Rami Malek’s Charles has a wealth of technical know-how and a sense of sheer determination that measures up to his contemporaries, seeing him go on a globe-trotting mission to track down the people responsible for his wife’s murder isn’t the usual ‘I have a particular set of skills’ affair. The thrills don’t come from how creatively he dispatches and misdirects those in his way (although that certainly helps), but from the understanding that the man is not built for this kind of work.
Amidst the varied casting around him, from the appreciated (Laurence Fishburne) to the wasted (Jon Bernthal) to the ‘actor serving as their own spoiler’ (Holt McCallany), Malek’s frustrated nervous energy is the film’s main throughline. The bigger set pieces aren’t the main draw (might be why the most interesting one with the pool was almost-entirely spoiled by the trailers), instead, the main conflict here is seeing a man so far out of his depth, and yet so obsessed with submerging himself in those waters. It sticks closer to Death Sentence than Death Wish in the way it portrays the mental toll that a fixation on revenge can have on a person, not to mention the toll required to take it up in the first place.
However, there’s a rather large obstacle in the way of making the most of that moral ambiguity: a lack of commitment to it. The plotting around Charles, with its interagency politics and blind-leading-the-blind developments, occasionally teeters on the edge of Burn After Reading-style farce. Thankfully, it has enough salience in its comments about the lack of accountability within the intelligence sector to make it stick. But when the focus is solely on Charles himself, who is coded throughout as being morally grey, where even if he does the right thing, it’s coming from a purely personal and vulnerable place, the film ends up bending over backwards to justify all this as him ‘doing the right thing’. Allergenic pollen torture included. Once Michael Stuhlbarg appears, it just devolves into the kind of half-thought-out morality treatise that not only wouldn’t look out of place in a Saw sequel, but was actively questioned and dissected as dubious in a Saw sequel (Saw II, to be precise). All this time spent trying to make Charles out to be something different within this sub-genre, only for him to receive the same conspicuous benefit of the doubt as everyone else; blerg!
The Amateur benefits from its intense lead, slick presentation, and lashings of flexibility with the norms of the standard revenge story, but Charles’ wife remarking that her husband doesn’t take enough risks ends up being the worst kind of prophecy for the hour-and-a-half that follows it. There’s compelling material here, both right at the front and between the margins, and those looking for another Mr. Robot fix of socially distant keyboard shenanigans will certainly get their fill. But its initial promise of committed variation from what has become a bit monotonous of late (hi, A Working Man), it’s hard not to feel disappointed in the end result.
