The Amateur movie review: Rami Malek seeks revenge in subpar spy thriller
2/5 stars
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Rami Malek shone in Mr. Robot, his breakout TV drama about cybersecurity and hackers, and it seems that ever since, he has been seeking something similar.
James Bond movie
No Time to Die , in which he played the villain, was very much a case of the spy who bored me. And now The Amateur, adapted from a novel by Robert Littell, crosses the same terrain.
Malek plays Charles Heller, a CIA cryptographer working at Langley, Virginia. When his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered in a terrorist attack in London, the distraught Charlie has only one thing on his mind: revenge.
Confronting his bosses, he demands mission-specific training. To shut him up, they agree, putting him with Laurence Fishburne's Colonel Henderson, who soon realises that Charlie does not have the mettle to be a cold-blooded killer.
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Undeterred, Charlie sets about using the skills he does have, tracking down the four people involved in Sarah's death, starting in Paris. It is almost like watching the polar opposite of Liam Neeson's Taken character chase down the bad guys.
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