The Amateur (2025) Movie Review: Revenge As a Dish Best-Served Lukewarm

Typecasting is a double-edged sword. On one hand, we’ve heard countless stories of idiosyncratic actors lamenting that what made them unique has been diluted by a nonstop series of cookie-cutter roles, giving them little, if any, opportunity to show any range. On the other hand, for some performers, it’s likely that without that typecasting, they may never find consistent work to begin with.

Not to say that Rami Malek should be thankful that the roles he receives seem to be contingent upon him recycling the same awkward veneer for which we all recognize him—the man did, after all, win an Oscar for a vaguely convincing, party-trick imitation of Freddie Mercury. Rather, in the case of “The Amateur,” it would be difficult to come to any conclusion aside from this role having been curated entirely for the actor’s fidgety sensibilities.

In the film, Malek goes full chameleon to portray an introverted computer expert…

No, no, this one’s different; he works for the CIA! It’s in this position of basement-level decryption that Malek’s Charles Heller is given the horrific news that his wife (Rachel Brosnahan, joining most of her castmates in being woefully underused) has been killed, taken as a hostage in a terror attack while at a conference in London. Heller is told of the tragedy by his superiors, but their help to Charles ends there; for reasons of “national security,” their involvement in bringing the wife’s killers to justice pretty much ends there.

That doesn’t stop Heller from taking matters into his own hands, and when he takes the length of a brief montage to uncover the identities of everyone involved in the killing, his superiors, in true bureaucratic fashion, continue to do nothing. Charles, however, is not as much of a pushover as one might think (which may or may not be a sign of inconsistent writing), and through his own ingenuity and a willingness towards blackmail, Charles heads out to serve up some globetrotting revenge all on his own.

It would be easy to assume that “The Amateur” was written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli specifically with Malek in mind (the star is also an executive producer on the project), as if photoshopping the “Mr. Robot” star right into a Langley office and calling it a day. You may be shocked to learn that not only was Malek not the first choice—hilariously enough, from the 2006 greenlighting of the project, the initial lead attached was famed introvert… Hugh Jackman?—but “The Amateur” is, in fact, a story that has been told before.

I don’t mean that director James Hawes—best-known for his TV work on “Black Mirror” and “Snowpiercer”—has crafted a tired rehash of any dime-a-dozen spy revenge thriller (ahem…); rather, “The Amateur” comes as an adaptation of Robert Littell’s 1981 novel, itself already having been adapted into a Canadian film that same year.

A still from The Amateur (2025). — A still from “The Amateur” (2025).

All this is just to say that the uphill battle that Hawes was facing by working with material that has been firmly entrenched in the cultural sphere for four decades now (even if not through this specific property, then by general framework permeating the genre) may very well have been offset by the benefit of having such a perfect-fitting star dropped right into his willing hands. (And, additionally, a more timely, if underdeveloped, view of imperialist corruption at its center.) In every sense, then, “The Amateur” is doing exactly what it says on the box, and your mileage will no doubt vary based on how tired you are of staring at that label.

Malek himself slips into the role with an ease far greater than the very demeanor demonstrated by his character—it would be more impressive if he’d have somehow fumbled the archetype he’s created for himself—but “The Amateur,” in its attempted plays at a deeper humanity through grief and reticence to kill, at least offers the actor some space to reach for some richer humanism. A particular recurring choice in which Malek will speak over someone’s question or statement with his reply before they’ve even finished, as if cutting them off to avoid the pain of sitting with their words, is a solid touch that informs this character’s particular sense of introversion.

Whether or not Heller is actually introverted, however, or simply talks as if he’s learning the English language as he’s speaking it is unclear, as “The Amateur” leans, by necessity, a bit too much into his competence as a field agent—competence he supposedly, as the title suggests, shouldn’t have—to make the narrative work. Hawes and his writers make an effort to balance an unwillingness to pull the trigger with the drive to flip the switch on an IED, but the longer the fill progresses, the more those wires begin to cross beyond the point of desirable detonation.

And while an admittedly fun bit involving lock-picking goes over with a solid laugh, every other demonstration of his inaptitude either rings false or doesn’t register at all if the plot is to move along; aside from hand-to-hand combat, Heller is simply (despite what Laurence Fishburne as his handler would profess) too good at everything.

James Hawes manages to keep “The Amateur” moving at a steady enough pace despite the complete waste of every actor not named Rami Malek. (Add this one to the long list of films that don’t realize Jon Bernthal is capable of being onscreen for more than a total of three minutes; at least he’s not alone in being shortchanged this time.) Still, between his hasty juggling of actors and his hasty ending that washes its hands of the wider (and more interesting) implications of who can actually be trusted, Hawes, in his second feature film, shows himself to be something of a… well, there must be a word for it.