Film Review: THE AMATEUR (2025): James Hawes’ Mediocre CIA Drama is Chock Full of Recycled Action Sequences

The Amateur Review

The Amateur (2025) Film Review, a movie directed by James Hawes, written by Ken Nolan, Gary Spinelli and Robert Littell and starring Rami Malek, Laurence Fishburne, Rachel Brosnahan, Holt McCallany, Jon Bernthal, Julianne Nicholson, Caitriona Balfe, Evan Milton, Michael Stuhlbarg, Nick Mills, Tiffany Gray, Adrian Martinez, Kate Sumpter, David Mills, Ryan Chilcote, Joseph Millson, Marc Rissmann and Danny Sapani.

Director James Hawes’ dark and dreary CIA drama, The Amateur, represents an old school Hollywood film-making style that should no longer exist for all intents and purposes. It’s based on a formula that was once hugely successful. You take an Oscar-winning star, mix that performer up with non-stop action sequences and throw in so many characters that everything happening on-screen is so chaotic that the director hopes nobody will notice how threadbare the script is. That philosophy of film-making worked at the box-office for many years and may just work again with The Amateur if the worldwide box-office grosses are adequate enough.

Rami Malek is the star here. He played Freddie Mercury in Bohemian Rhapsody, a role that won him the Academy Award for Best Actor. So, naturally the next step for a performer like Malek is to sell out and make an action picture that feels like it is right off the assembly line to make quick money. That goal is seemingly accomplished with The Amateur.

As Hawes’ complex, but still flat, premise gets under way, Malek’s character, Charles Heller, a CIA something or other, loses his wife, Sarah (a short performance by Rachel Brosnahan) in an act of terrorist violence. As the film establishes their bond, there isn’t much depth to the husband and wife as characters. He’s working all the time and she’s going away for a bit. They say they’ll see each other when she gets back. Of course, she doesn’t come home and Charles vows vengeance against those who took Sarah from him at any cost. A key character here is Director Moore (Holt McCallany) who severely underestimates that the timid Charles has any chance of finding and killing the people responsible for Sarah’s death. If Charles couldn’t do it mostly on his own, there’d be no movie so you better believe that this amateur has what it takes to obtain vengeance.

Charles and who he thinks is a 50-year old man have been exchanging messages. Enter Inquiline (a well-cast Caitriona Balfe) who is the token female character that is something of a stand-in for the wife that was taken from Charles. Inquiline helps Charles keep his mind off his loss so he can be focused on revenge as these two characters form a bond together. She wants to cuddle with him at one point, but the pair is discovered by some bad guys which further complicates their plans on getting to know each other better.

Laurence Fishburne is Henderson, Charles’ reluctant partner in trying to locate the bad guys. You can almost write this script if you were given a pen and paper and asked to create stock characters. Henderson is the typical know-it-all sidekick who plays by the rule book but must go by Charles’ new rules in order to achieve justice. Fishburne is actually the best thing about the film because the type of character he plays is easily recognizable and thus it’s easy to admire how well the accomplished Fishburne plays him.

Tossed into the mix is the usually wonderful Julianne Nicholson as Director O’Brien. Nicholson and McCallany share a pretty bad scene together where she starts to inquire why his character has made the questionable decisions he has in regards to the situation at hand in the film. Nicholson is one of my favorite character actresses, but she’s clearly sold out for a quick and easy buck here. I’m not saying she didn’t like the material, but either she and McCallany were phoning this scene in or it was something that should have ended up on the cutting room floor.

Charles locates the goons he wants to find. In a spectacular set piece, one of them (Marc Rissmann) is in a pool. Then, the glass around the pool shatters and we get a glorious action revenge scene that doesn’t develop any of the characters, but is sure exciting to watch.

Rami Malek is certainly committed to his role. He plays it straight and does the job he was asked to do. I think he’s more capable as an actor than this movie allows him to be. Matt Damon used to do those Bourne movies and the filmmakers are probably hoping this will be Malek’s ticket to future Amateur pictures, but alas, The Amateur lives up to its title and is “amateur night” when compared to the far superior The Bourne Identity.

It must sound like I hated The Amateur. I really didn’t. This film has a great musical score to keep the adrenaline pumping and despite its dark colors and somber tone, there can be genuine suspense in the run-of-the-mill chase scenes that have our characters running through rooms, up stairs, etc. I only wished that the movie’s ending was a bit more substantial than it is. This film checks a lot of boxes and then, after a series of convoluted plot developments, ends. It’s tightly edited from a technical standpoint. The Amateur may be sufficient, but if you’re an action film connoisseur, you’ve definitely seen this one before. Believe me.

Rating: 6/10

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