The Amateur Spoiler Movie Review

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I saw this movie on Thursday, April 10, 2025. There are spoilers in this review.

I’ve heard on the internet how Rami Malek almost seems alien-like in his appearance. This, coupled with his performance in the Mr. Robot show, makes him perfect for The Amateur.

He plays CIA analyst Charles Heller. At the beginning of the film, his wife is on a business trip in London; terrorist activity takes place during her visit, and she is murdered. Heller then uses his intelligence to solve his wife's murder and get revenge while on the run from his employer.

This was really well done, as I felt tense several times while watching The Amateur. In the film, Rami Malek plays a character who aspires to be a field agent. This is hinted at in the first act while talking to Jon Bernthal, who plays this dude-bro agent in several ongoing operations in the field.

After the murder of his wife, his CIA superiors suggest Heller go home and mourn. But he feels the government entity he works for isn't doing much about going after those responsible. It’s when Heller blackmails them, uncovering underground operations they signed off on, that his superiors supply him with the field agent training to help execute his own plan.  All the while, these same superiors have plans to eliminate Malek.

There is a subplot of his CIA superiors trying to clean house from the old regime(the ones planning to kill Heller/Malek)that was intriguing as well.

There were some things I didn't like or understand with the storytelling. 

The scene where Rami Malek murders the first person who is responsible for killing his wife takes place in France.  He is sloppy in this attempt at doing so(that is expected because he has minimal field training).  At the end of this particular assasination, Heller/Malek is running after the guilty party, waving a gun in his hand.  The person is killed by an oncoming car.  Heller runs away.  My thought was, isn’t the police after this guy?  In a film that relies so much on the main character using CCTV cameras, wouldn’t the French authorities be looking for this man?

The other logic gap for me was in one of the final scenes, where Laurence Fishburne finds Malek in a car and thanks him, I’m assuming, for not implicating him with the CIA superiors who were after Malek throughout the movie.  This part, I thought, I have to rewatch it again with subtitles to understand what happened there.

Overall, I enjoyed this and can see it becoming a franchise. It's a fun, edge-of-your-seat thriller. Fun stuff. 7.5 out of 10.

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