After winning an Academy Award for Best Actor in 2018 for Bohemian Rhapsody, Rami Malek’s appearances onscreen have been conspicuous by their virtual infrequency. His odd track record results from several factors, including the COVID pandemic, the writers and actors strikes, and Malek’s desire to find a lead role commensurate with his talents, skill set, and interests. Whatever the reason or rationale, the few onscreen appearances he’s made over the last seven years have been primarily in minor or supporting roles, including Amsterdam and Oppenheimer.
Although it met with vocal pushback from critics and audiences, only his eccentric turn as the predictably flamboyant villain in No Time To Die stands out across Malek’s post-Oscar period. His latest role as Charles Heller inThe Amateur, Charles Heller, doesn’t compare to any of his earlier, more memorable turns, specifically his Emmy Award-winning performance as Elliot Alderson in Mr. Robot, but at least it’s a reminder that Malek, for all of his scarcity onscreen, remains a compellingly idiosyncratic performer, one with few equals.
In fact, longtime fans of Mr. Robot and Malek will notice similarities between these two roles. In each, he plays another genius-level super-hacker, works for a cyber-security agency (literally the “Agency” in The Amateur), and is haunted by the physical manifestations of his interior state of mind–overwhelming grief and loss in The Amateur and anxiety and dissociative identity disorder in Mr. Robot. Both can be described as techno/cyber-thrillers, although The Amateur, as a feature, inevitably has limits to its exploration of surveillance society and the moral quandaries faced by agents of our late-capitalist, imperialist system. If anything, it sidesteps them altogether, instead embracing the simplicity and accessibility of its revenge plot.
When we meet Malek’s character, Charlie Heller, a well-compensated security expert and cryptographer for the CIA, he’s saying his goodbyes to his wife, Sarah Horowitz (Rachel Brosnahan), before she departs to an unspecified conference in London. Despite his wife’s entreaties to join her, Charlie decides against going with Sarah, a choice that figuratively and literally haunts him when she’s executed in cold blood during a botched heist with international implications.
Forced to sit on the sidelines due to his lack of field training or experience, Heller leverages compromising information against his superiors to obtain a crash course in spycraft from an aging agency veteran, Colonel Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne). Almost immediately, Henderson realizes that Heller would fail in the field. He’s not suited for hand-to-hand combat and his somewhat subpar eyesight makes him a poor shot, thus making Heller the titular “amateur.” He doesn’t graduate to “professional” (as in “professional killer”) until the final moments of the film, if at all.
Adapted by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli from a lightly remembered 1981 spy novel by Robert Littell, The Amateur follows a standard, rote revenge plot. To be fair, the globe-trotting and city-hopping setting and the circumstances surrounding Heller’s loss, combined with slick and polished visuals courtesy of longtime TV director James Hawes and, of course, a professional cast led by Malek, Fishburne, and Brosnahan all help to elevate The Amateur beyond generic streaming-level fodder.
Unsurprisingly, The Amateur’s feints toward contemporary relevance–i.e., saying anything of significance about the CIA’s disreputable history in and out of American politics–go nowhere. They’re the result of a lack of conviction and an unwillingness to challenge audience members of a rightward persuasion. Instead, The Amateur goes where every “safe” mainstream film involving the CIA has gone, including the Bourne series: The CIA can never fail. It can be, however, failed. It can be failed by wayward, rogue members of the CIA, well-meaning (maybe), making the wrong decisions for the “right” reasons: “national security.” The phrase has been made practically meaningless through overuse.
