ArcaMax

"The Amateur" is based on a 1981 Canadian secret-agent movie as forgotten today as this one will probably be 44 years from now. Don't get me wrong: The new picture is perfectly OK; it does its job. Well, pretty much. There's some gunplay, some bomb play, some Euro travel. But there's nothing new about most of it. (The big glass swimming pool in one scene is pretty fresh, but it's CGI, which drains the wonder from it.) And the kicky continent-hopping, as in many mid-budget movies, is a little sketchy: A chyron tells us at one point that we're in Madrid, but all we can see for sure is that we're in a hotel somewhere.

The movie's central flaw is in its casting. Its star, Rami Malek, deserved the Oscar he won for playing Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in the 2018 biopic "Bohemian Rhapsody"; but here, taking on the role of an introverted CIA code analyst, he's stuck with a character with virtually no personality, and the movie, already rather glumly shot by English TV director James Hawes, never fully comes to life.

Malek is Charlie Heller, a decryption specialist at CIA headquarters in (say it all together!) Langley, Virginia. His colleagues think he's a funless drudge, and Lord knows they're right. But his life does have a bright side. It's his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), a corporate exec of some sort -- a civilian, not a spook. On a work trip to London, Sarah gets caught up in a terrorist attack and is shot dead on the street. Charlie is naturally devastated, but his snide boss, an agency hardon named Moore (Holt McCallany), makes no move to get to the bottom of her murder. What's going on?

By this point we've become acquainted with Charlie's only real friend outside the Company -- an anonymous computer voice-chip called Inquiline, a character based who knows where. Inquiline sounds like a woman, and she's sometimes helpful. Recently, for example, she provided Charlie with a trove of hot documents, warning him to be careful, because they were "compromising to your agency." Thus armed, Charlie makes a pest of himself around the shop, demanding to be trained as an assassin so he can terminate his wife's killer. Moore finds this funny/pathetic.

The agency reluctantly gives Charlie the training he wants -- under the guidance of one Colonel Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), who pronounces him a very bad shot and almost entirely hopeless. ("You're just not a killer, Charlie.") Nevertheless, the hapless analyst has major digital smarts and he sets off in search of some of the terrorists he's managed to identify. First stop: Paris, where he brings a bag of pollen to a confrontation with a nasty asthmatic named Gretchen (Barbara Probst). (Unlikely as it may sound, this is one of the best action scenes in the movie.) Then he presses on to Marseille, Istanbul, Romania, holding his own in the face of various dangers with cleverly improvised mayhem.

Not all of this is persuasive. For instance, how likely is it that a smartphone in a faraway hotel could be set in advance to trigger a complex incident out in the middle of a stormy ocean? And then there's the lockpicking scene. Charlie has to break into a room in an apartment building. To do so he calls up YouTube on his phone and clicks on a lockpicking instructional video. It's nighttime, he's on a quiet landing outside the target door, and he leaves the volume on his phone fully pumped. This is one of those movie moments that's both clever and stupid at the same time.

I haven't mentioned Caitriona Balfe, who gives the film's most moving performance, playing a lonesome widow living on a windy seashore. Talking to Charlie about the loss of her long-dead husband, Balfe has the movie's best line. "I wasn't prepared for how quiet the world would become," she says.

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To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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