The Bourne IT

The set up for The Amateur is a well worn one, a man loses his wife in a terrorist attack and goes on a mission of revenge. The twist is, that while Rami Malek does play a man with a particular set of skills, they aren't the ones you would expect. Charlie Heller is a socially awkward CIA cryptographer with precisely zero fighting ability and no experience using firearms. He is though, a technological genious who invented half the agencies cyber security and can track and predict patterns like a computer. When his blatantly shady boss, played with smug glee by Holt Mccallany, refuses to act on Charlie's info about the killers he blackmails him for some training and the green light to pursue the perpetrators himself. The two main questions are, can the mild mannered tech guy thrive in the field and is this twist on the formulae enough to carry a fairly by the numbers espionage thriller? The answer to both is, pretty much, yes.

Malek is tailor made for roles like this and it's hard to imagine anyone else playing the character this way. You don't really get a sense of his loss but this clearly isn't a person who processes emotion very well and the former Mr Robot is very good at portraying characters that are heavily implied to be on the autism spectrum without descending into insulting parody. He is backed up by a solid supporting cast, including Lawrence Fishburne who really turns up as Charlie's trainer come cat and mouse advisory. Jon Bernthal appears as a field spy and "the deadliest man in the building" with about five minutes screen time that must be designed to set up a spin off/ sequel/ crossover. Sadly, the female characters fare less well. Rachel Bresnahan does well with what she gets as Charlie's wife but its precious little and she is one of two women the lead knows who gets fridged. Julianne Nicholson is the new CIA Director who is out to clean up the agency but is also barely featured.

As befitting an analyst rather than an action man, the film moves at a deliberate pace rather than lurch from one action set piece to another. Apart from the odd scene it also skips over how Charlie sets up his elaborate villain traps, opting for the viewer to see fruits of his labour at the same time as his victims rather than get into far fetched explanations of how he is able to construct a device that "constricts" metre thick glass. We don't even know where he is pulling all these electronics from as he travel the globe. It is good that the script spends the layering up the follow me, follow you, shenanigans rather than waste time on unsatisfying explanations. At one point Charlie is tracking his targets while being tracked by his unscrupulous superiors while they are in turn being tracked by their boss. This is as a good espionage thriller should be, though it never threatens to turn into anything spectacular or particularly clever. The same can be said of the final showdown, which does play it a little differently but ultimately boils down to the same "we ain't so different you and I" chat you've heard many a time before.

That is really the story of The Amateur, it's a fairly generic but well executed thriller with a kooky rather than suave leading man who disposes of his opposition in unconventional ways. Nothing wrong with that.

7 underestimated individuals out of 10.

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