The Amateur

Great movie.

I wont mix my words the only way to describe "The Amateur", is painfully long winded and ultimately, boring as hell. There are a lot of things that could have been done with what is, essentially, an action thriller. Regrettably, the overly long lead in, combined with the unreasonably timid handling, leads to a anti climatic experience, where the pay off in terms of thrills and actual action, never really arrives. Its by no means the casts fault. Lead actor, Rami Malek is as capable and convincing, as ever. The problem, in this reviewers opinion, is yet another case of a weak script, that needed to be thoroughly re-written. In summary, the concepts solid but the execution is lack lustre, long winded and excessively timid. Not recommended.

“Heller” (Rami Malek) is the geeky “Jack Ryan” type, stuck in an office five floors below sunlight working on intelligence gathering and decrypting for the CIA. Intrigued by his latest set of dossiers from a deep throat somewhere on the internet, he suspects he has stumbled upon something nefarious. Before he has time to investigate, though, he hears that his wife has been the victim of a terrorist attack in London and so now he’s seeing red. Using the information he has recently obtained as leverage, he gets himself trained and equipped for an operational mission to get some revenge. Thing is, “Heller” isn’t a natural born killer, and despite the best efforts of his handler “Henderson” (Laurence Fishburne) he isn’t considered likely to be much more effective than a wet lettuce when it comes to killing anyone. What we now see is that there are more ways than one to skin a cat and brain can sometimes overcome brawn if applied with plenty of explosives, sticky tape and even the odd rogue missile. That’s perhaps the problem with this film: we’ve seen it all before - and more compellingly, too. Malek does enough but the rest of the cast really underwhelm and the set-piece action scenes come all too few and far between before an ending that really just fizzles out. James Hawes has presented us with a great looking film, packed with gadgets and gizmos, and the story also does make you realise just how big brotherly society has become with cameras apparently everywhere manipulating imagery from your shadow cast on a water-filled dustbin lid - but after a while, that all becomes a little repetitive and the plot settles into an implausible predictability. It has it’s moments, but sadly that’s all they are and this is a film that you’ll soon forget all about.