Posted in: 20th Century Studios, Kaitlyn Booth, Movies, Review | Tagged: the amateur

The Amateur Review: While Not Inept, It Is Dull And Forgettable

The Amateur completely fails to come together, and any parts that do fit only elevate the film to barely passing.

The Amateur is trying to do something different with its title character, but thanks to clumsy writing, mediocre performances, and lackluster pacing, the film never elevates beyond being serviceable at best.

Director: James Hawes
Summary: When his supervisors at the CIA refuse to take action after his wife is killed in a London terrorist attack, a decoder takes matters into his own hands.

The spy genre, or some variation of it, has existed for nearly as long as media has existed. The modern version of it has continued to evolve over the years as James Bond became a public figure and the realities of post-9/11 America and the rise of new technology. There is nothing wrong with trying something new, and there is nothing wrong with sticking with the same thing that has worked a million times before because execution is everything at the end of the day. Unfortunately, execution is the thing that kneecaps The Amateur.  Part of the premise of the film is the idea that intelligence and knowledge about tech are just as deadly as someone with a gun. The problem is, like most stories like this, the film uses intelligence as a crutch when it doesn't want to explain anything.

Charlie is smart; someone drops his IQ score at one point because, of course, Charlie is not clairvoyant. The movie seems to think that he is, though, and it just uses his intelligence and technology as a way to explain what's going on. This seems to be happening more in media with the increased reliance on storylines in which super geniuses run the show, but no amount of smarts can make you pull knowledge or details out of thin air, which is what happens here. Perhaps the book this is based on avoids this problem, but if that's the case, it was a crucial detail that was lost in adaptation, and that's never a good thing. It renders so much of the tension in the film moot because Charlie knows everything, so everything is fine.

As The Amateur tries to desperately tell us over and over again why Charlie is so different from general CIA guns for hire and waving its arms frantically in the air about how different that makes everything, it also relies on some very predictable cliches. A woman is here to be fridged because we needed to give Charlie enough manpain to go out and do everything we don't expect from someone like him. The government he is working for is corrupt, the CIA is shady, and we have seen all of these things ten million times before. If executed well, none of it would matter. However, due to Charlie's story being so weak, the cliches and tropes that surround him become more and more prominent and drag the entire film down.

This also might be one of the times when the marketing works against the film. We know that Charlie isn't going to kill people in the typical ways; he's going to do something different. That's the entire draw of the film. The problem is a lot of the trailers and other marketing materials have shown off two of the kills in the film, and there are only four total targets. So between everything becoming more and more predictable aside from Charlie's execution, and then half of that being spoiled by the marketing, the already present pacing issues make this two-hour film feel so much longer than it actually is.

None of this is helped by Rami Malek, who is putting in one of the weirdest performances of 2025, and not in a good way. The rest of the cast around him is doing a good job, but it seems like he's going for this "awkward genius who might be on the spectrum" type of vibe. Instead, he just comes across as awkward. Nothing about it feels natural in any way; this is like the opposite of someone neurodivergent trying to mask that and not doing a very good job. This is someone trying to present as neurodivergent (maybe?) and not being believable at all. Hollywood keeps trying to make Malek a movie star, and they have been attempting to do this since Mr. Robot, but it's becoming more and more apparent that Malek is a one-trick pony who had his one performance that worked, and the rest is just lip service — or lipsyncing.

The Amateur completely fails to come together, and any parts that do fit only elevate the film to barely passing. It's far from terrible, but what it is might be worse. It's boring, dull, and ultimately forgettable in every way that matters. A failure is at least interesting to examine; you get to pick it apart to see what made everything implode, but The Amateur isn't that. It never falls apart, but it never really comes together, and in the age of so many movies and television shows being released on so many different platforms, being dull and forgettable might be the greatest sin a studio film can commit.

The Amateur

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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4.5/10

The Amateur is trying to do something different with its title character, but thanks to clumsy writing, mediocre performances, and lackluster pacing, the film never elevates beyond being serviceable at best.

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