By Nick Nitkowski

Who doesn’t love a good espionage movie? When they are done correctly, they can be incredibly enjoyable films. But on the flipside, they are very easy to get wrong and become long and drawn-out films with very little substance that warrants questioning the existence of the project. “The Amateur” is an espionage movie that was never even on my radar until I saw the trailer. The trailer was intriguing and actually made me want to see the film. The trailer did a really good job at selling me to want to watch it. Now that I have seen it, here are my thoughts on it.

“The Amateur” is about a man named Charlie Heller, played by Rami Malek, who works in the world of espionage behind the monitors instead of the field. But on one fateful date where his beloved wife is killed, he seeks to find the men responsible for his wife’s murder by seeking training from a CIA operative, played by Lawrence Fishburne, while also utilizing his tech-savvy intellect to claim his revenge. The movie also stars Jon Bernthal, Rachel Brosnahan, Holt McCallany, and Julianne Nicholson.

As I had mentioned earlier, the trailer did a great job at selling me on this movie to the point where I wanted to see it on the big screen. Unfortunately, “The Amateur” has become a classic case of giving too much away in the trailer. All of the best parts of the film were shown in the movie’s trailer. This is highly unfortunate because it left very little substance for the actual movie. Because you’re anticipating the scenes shown on screen, you become painfully aware of how long it’s taking the movie to get to those moments. 

As far as the performances go, they’re okay. Nothing to really write home about. Which kind of doubles as a negative because the movie is mostly dialogue-based leading up to the revenge scenes that we mostly already saw. A lot of it was not particularly engaging for me which only added to my awareness of how long the movie was taking to get to the “good” stuff. With a runtime of only two hours, I really felt the runtime and the relief by the time the movie was finished. Some of the familiar-named actors don’t have a lot of screen time. One in particular didn’t even serve much purpose to the overall story.

The movie mentions that it’s based on a novel of the same name written by Robert Littell, but what I didn’t know until very recently was that it’s actually a remake of a movie of the same name. Given the source material being somewhat generic this day and age, I can’t help but wonder if the original 1981 version of the film is better. As history has shown us, remakes often pale in comparison to the predecessor. Very rarely are remakes better than the original and I can honestly say that this isn’t one of them, in my opinion. Perhaps reading the novel can result in one contemplating a better concept of a film adaptation.

Overall, if you were fortunate enough to have not seen the trailers for “The Amateur” or managed to avoid any advertisements outside of the movie poster, then there is a really strong chance that you could possibly enjoy this movie a lot more than I did. But as it stands for me, the poster sold me good by giving me all the good stuff in advance and leaving not much left by the time I was invested. In a way, I feel a little cheated and because of that, I have no desire to rewatch this movie anytime soon. Not that there was any re-watchability with it to begin with. The advertising conned me like a pro to watch a movie that was structured like an Amateur.

2 stars