‘The Amateur’ review: An okay spy movie I wish was funnier
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If you ignore the dead wife of it all when it comes to The Amateur, the movie should be a comedy. A man who stumbles into being a spy for the CIA and taking down a crime ring all while he can barely shoot a gun? Joke abound!
Charles Heller (Rami Malek) works in data at the CIA. But when his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is taken hostage and then killed by a group of hired hands while she’s on a work trip, Charlie makes it his job to track down everyone responsible for her death. The problem is that he does not know how to shoot a gun or kill anyone.
With dirty CIA members and Charlie kind of fumbling his way through Europe, we get to see the lengths he will go to avenge his wife’s murder. And while on the one hand I understand that he is someone who loved his wife, I wish that it was a little funnier. Hear me out: He’s an amateur at this. He should make more mistakes!
In the film itself, the way he kills those responsible for his wife’s death is on them. The first kill was completely on accident (a rogue car hit the woman when he was trying to chase after her). The rest, he puts into the hands of the person he is after until the last death when we finally get to see everything he learned. But all those moments could have been funny and made Charlie’s journey that much better.
Throughout the movie, I thought it was going to be a twist that the wife wasn’t really dead and he was doing this all for vengeance that wasn’t necessary. Instead, it was…very much real and upsetting.
I just couldn’t get over the dead wife of it all
A wife dying for a man’s motivation is, unfortunately, a tale as old as time. It has happened often in movies, just look at Inception. But killing off a woman because a man needs some kind of driving force isn’t the most intelligent of storytelling maneuvers. Oh a woman died to get a man to do something? Thrilling.
And The Amateur wasn’t exciting enough for me to move past her death. If the film leaned into Charlie’s inability to be a stone-cold killer a little more, I think I’d find that a more compelling way of telling this story. Instead, he’s kind of okay at it and then good by the end of the film and so we’re left with a man who just becomes an okay CIA agent with a dead wife.
Killing someone off for motivation isn’t offensive but it is boring. If you told me this man with a desk job did all this as a way of saving his wife? I’d be more interested but the driving force of this movie just was not enough for me to care about whether or not Charlie succeeded.
The moral of the story is to not kill off a woman as a motivation. Especially if you’re not going to have your main character be really bad at a job he’s unqualified for.
(featured image: John Wilson/20th Century Studios)
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