‘The Amateur’ Review: A Relaxed and Pleasurable Throwback to the Spy Pulp of Yesteryear

A lot has changed in geopolitics since Charles Jarrott’s 1981 adaptation of Robert Littell’s novel The Amateur. Today, terrorism definitions are significantly muddier than the binaries of good and evil that were readily amplified during the Cold War. While the C.I.A. has always operated behind closed doors and in dark corners, governed by murky morality, it now does so behind the firewall of an ever-expanding surveillance state.

James Hawes’s adaptation of Littell’s novel, written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, is, like its predecessor, concerned with the inherently questionable ethics of an institution that has never, and will never, operate in daylight. “Nice office,” C.I.A. Director Moore (Holt McCallany) remarks to data analyst Charles Heller (Rami Malek) in the film, to which Heller cheekily responds that it is—if you don’t mind never having sunlight.

The Amateur is a relaxed and pleasurable throwback to the spy pulp of the 1970s and ’80s, yet told with a (mostly) honest appraisal of the C.I.A.’s ethical failings. While the 1981 film challenged notions of good and evil in American narratives of our war against the Soviet Union, this one interrogates the degrees of cowardice involved in state-sanctioned murder when it can be conducted by the push of a button or the dropping of a drone strike.

Heller is thrust into the middle of that moral quandary when his photographer wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), is killed in a London terrorist attack after attempting to save someone else’s life. Despite being heralded for his gift for analysis, Heller’s pleas for a mission of retribution are smacked down by Moore. Desperate for vengeance, Heller digs into files above his pay grade, and upon stumbling upon a web of deceit, he threatens to whistleblow the intel to the press unless Moore and Caleb agree to train and send him to Europe to find his wife’s killers.

With no choice but to accept, the men send him to train under Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), until Heller slips from view and touches off a cat-and-mouse game in which Moore’s black ops chase Heller and still more C.I.A. agents, under newly appointed Director O’Brien (Julianne Nicholson), chase the black ops. It’s a complex web that neatly accesses the C.I.A.’s infighting and how willing the government can be to sacrifice its own in order to save face.

Hawes’s last film, One Life, built its narrative tension primarily around the click-clacking of bureaucracy at work, and The Amateur finds similar success in dramatizing the various levers of modern technological warfare. And Heller, a mildly agoraphobic savant whose predilection for puzzles makes him a particularly good fit for the C.I.A.’s contemporary methods, is a suitable conduit for Hawes’s approach. Malek’s characters frequently feel perched on the borderlands of insanity, and he brings Heller’s raw trauma to the fore with a persistently quivering intensity.

The Amateur is exciting for the way it sustains its corkscrew tension, but it’s also frustratingly imperfect. As effortlessly cool as the performances are, many of the actors are underutilized, namely Jon Bernthal as a hotshot field agent. And given the pointed simmer of its politics right out of the gate, it can feel like a dubious about-face for the way it suggests that the C.I.A. can be a force for good so long as it remains “honest” about its intentions. Still, that the film can’t be firmly called pro- or anti-establishment is perhaps to its credit. Besides, the most lasting and captivating sentiment you may take from it is ultimately sociological rather than political: that in an increasingly isolated world, bereavement may be our strongest unifying force.