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Though The Amateur is a new movie, and a fairly entertaining one, in many ways it feels like a missive from a lost era. A brilliant but low-level encryption employee at the CIA, played by Rami Malek, discovers that a group of rogue operators have tried to cover up a drone strike that killed American allies, blaming the attack on insurgents. When he confronts them with this knowledge, threatening to leak it to the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN, they seem genuinely nervous—as if any of those august news institutions still had the power to shock the average U.S. citizen, or even most of the country’s elected officials, with a revelation about arrogant government bigwigs violating protocol. If you’re looking for a work of fantasy to make you feel wistful about the old world order—one in which whistleblowers could blow a whistle and people would actually hear it—The Amateur is the movie for you.
But we can still dream, can’t we? In the 1990s and early 2000s, a thriller like The Amateur would hit theaters every few weeks. These pictures didn’t have to be earth-shatteringly good; if they provided a few hours of moderate pleasure on a weekend evening, that was enough. Similarly, The Amateur is pleasantly average, a semi-preposterous thriller that’s also transportive—parts of it were filmed in France, England, and Turkey, and by the end, you feel you’ve at least gotten a movie’s-eye view of those places. If The Amateur is unremarkable, it’s also efficient and effective, and sometimes all you need is a movie that gets the job done.
Malek’s Charlie Heller is mindful and methodical in everything he does. When he makes a cup of coffee for his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), who’s about to head off to London for a short business trip, he measures the grains so precisely you can almost smell their earthy, cock-a-doodle-doo briskness. Then he heads to work; the couple live somewhere in the country, which seems about a thousand breaths of…
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