Espionage thrillers—or thrillers in general—thrive on making the audience feel like the protagonist: constantly threatened, boxed in, and scrambling for a way out. The reward comes when that character flips the situation through smarts, skill, and execution.
The Amateur had the perfect setup to deliver exactly that. Rami Malek returns to the spy world after playing the villain in the most recent Bond film—this time as a kind of off-brand Q turned rogue. He plays Charles Heller, a CIA cryptographer whose wife is killed in a terrorist attack. When the agency decides not to pursue the killers, he takes matters into his own hands and heads into the field seeking revenge.
The premise suggests a Bourne-like thriller, but with brains over brawn—a refreshing change from the usual muscle-bound spies (or martial arts specialists like John Wick). Heller’s arc as an office-bound codebreaker stepping into danger for the first time could’ve made for a grounded, intelligent take on the genre. But the film rarely lets his intellect shine. Despite his hacking background, his tactics never go beyond tropes we’ve seen countless times—fake passports, dodging borders—and only one moment (a clever escape from Fishburne’s Robert Henderson) hints at real ingenuity. It’s a thriller that moves through the motions without ever building suspense or payoff.
Once the setup is done, the film starts cutting corners. Plot developments rely on baffling decisions from supposedly elite professionals, and conveniently, everyone involved in the conspiracy is tied to Heller. The CIA hasn’t looked this inept in quite some time. In one scene, the director (a severely underused Julianne Nicholson) chooses to trust someone just because they say, “You can trust me.” I wish I had her optimism.
The film aims for cat-and-mouse tension, but there’s no real chase. Most of Heller’s targets don’t even know he’s coming, and he’s never given a true intellectual adversary. There’s a brief subplot with the CIA trying to track him, and he eventually teams up with Inquiline Davies (Caitríona Balfe, giving the film’s only memorable supporting performance). Their scenes—centered on shared grief—are the film’s best. But otherwise, the story limps toward a flat, unearned climax. The villain is barely defined, the targets seem clueless, and the big reveals come too late to land emotionally.
To keep us invested, the film relies on repeated flashbacks of Heller’s life with his wife—as if we might forget why he’s on this mission. But since we never actually see the attack or feel its immediate aftermath, the whole journey lacks urgency and emotional depth.
The script also forces in a moral conflict that doesn’t ring true. Heller is supposedly reluctant to kill up close, but when the plot demands it, he makes cruel decisions without hesitation. That hypocrisy becomes a limp through-line in his scenes with Laurence Fishburne’s mentor figure (who looks the part but barely registers), and again in the final confrontation with the villain—where any discussion of morality or justification is replaced by vague posturing.
Malek tries to bring nuance to Heller, layering his performance with a nervous voice and stiff physicality. But it all feels too calculated. You can see him working hard to convey grief and complexity—especially in the early emotional beats—but Heller never becomes a real person. He’s just a bundle of tics and affectations.
Without clever twists, intelligent sequences, or a compelling lead to root for, The Amateur simply drifts through a checklist of spy movie tropes. And in a thriller, leaving the audience with no one to cheer for is an amateurish move.