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In Theaters Now
- 2025
- PG-13
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- 2 h 2 m
- 2025
- PG-13
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- 2 h 2 m
Summary Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is a brilliant, but deeply introverted decoder for the CIA working out of a basement office at headquarters in Langley whose life is turned upside down when his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is killed in a London terrorist attack. When his supervisors refuse to take action, he takes matters into his own hands, embar...
Directed By: James Hawes
Written By: Ken Nolan, Gary Spinelli, Robert Littell
In Theaters Now
- 2025
- PG-13
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- 2 h 2 m
- 2025
- PG-13
- Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures
- 2 h 2 m
The Amateur
52
6.5
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Summary Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is a brilliant, but deeply introverted decoder for the CIA working out of a basement office at headquarters in Langley whose life is turned upside down when his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is killed in a London terrorist attack. When his supervisors refuse to take action, he takes matters into his own hands, embar...
Directed By: James Hawes
Written By: Ken Nolan, Gary Spinelli, Robert Littell
Where to Watch
Not available in your country?
ExpressVPN
Get 3 Extra months free
$6.67/mth
Top Cast
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 37 Critic Reviews
52
32% Positive
12 Reviews
12 Reviews
59% Mixed
22 Reviews
22 Reviews
8% Negative
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
Metascore
Mixed or Average
Based on 37 Critic Reviews
52
32% Positive
12 Reviews
12 Reviews
59% Mixed
22 Reviews
22 Reviews
8% Negative
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
It is respectful and smooth filmmaking that never loses sight of its one and only goal: keeping its audience hooked.
Yes, Charlie Heller (a brilliant Rami Malek) spends an appropriate amount of time dreaming up memories of his beautiful wife Sarah (an underutilized Rachel Brosnahan), but the screenplay by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli offers plenty more than the usual setup of a man hulking out over a woman's death.
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 51 User Ratings
6.5
51% Positive
26 Ratings
26 Ratings
43% Mixed
22 Ratings
22 Ratings
6% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
User Score
Generally Favorable
Based on 51 User Ratings
6.5
51% Positive
26 Ratings
26 Ratings
43% Mixed
22 Ratings
22 Ratings
6% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
Rami Malek and llaurence fishburne performance was amazing. This was not an action movie but a thriller.
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James Hawes, who directed the entire first season of Slow Horses, clearly knows his way around the spy genre. Which is why this disjointed thriller about a brilliant CIA code cracker turned elite operative (Rami Malek) delivers at least some pacy thrills and globe-hopping intrigue, despite numerous issues with the screenplay, structure and casting.
Its baseline competence is perfectly watchable. It’s just hard to imagine anyone signing onto this project with the explicitly stated goal of only making it watchable.
It’s a promising premise—a nerdy CIA decoder (Rami Malek) turns unlikely action hero when his wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is murdered by terrorists—but the movie promises more than it delivers in terms of suspense, escalating tension and a reason for being.
Malek’s icy performance does little to endear the viewer to Charlie, while his ultra-tactile relationship with his wife – presented in gauzy flashbacks – never feels entirely authentic.
Mr. Malek is incapable of providing the audience with an emotional hook.
Being based on a novel is enough to give the benefit of the doubt, particularly for Rami Malek who, in the role of a cryptographer, asks nothing of Jason Statham. It's not out of place to give it a chance.
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Loved this movie because it was extremely well done, produced and loved the score. Pacing was excellent, loved the action and revenge trope. Great performances all around, Rami Malek, Laurence Fishburne, Rachel Brosnahan, & Jon Bernthal :) Entertaining, fun and just a good escapist time! Highly recommend it, especially for a date night! :))
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A nerdy guy wants retribution, he doesn't have the skill or the balls, so he uses what he's has - his brain. Turns out he's about as clever as Skynet, cunning as batman and as much as diva as Kim Kardashians kids, who get exactly what they want, when they ask for it.
That's the problem with this film - It's Jason Bourne, but self made... he shouldn't be this good, or clever - because it's impossible, so it's all together unconvincing and predictable. Yet, still a worthy watch.
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Неплохой, нереалистичный и местами шаблонный шпионский фильм на один раз, можно посмотреть когда нет ничего более интересного.
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The Amateur isn’t just dry. It’s embalmed. It is the spy thriller you give your dad when he’s too tired for Tinker Tailor but not drunk enough for Taken. A tepid nod to competence. This is a film that, much like its titular character, seems uncertain of its own authority. It doesn’t flail, but it also never strikes. It has all the markings of cinema—actors, plot, a score that tries—but none of its soul. It is the cinematic equivalent of a beige waiting room: sanitized, dull, and inoffensively hollow. We saw it in Dolby. Or so we were told. Because the Dolby experience here was like hearing God whisper through a pillow. It was less a sensory assault than a PowerPoint presentation in a boardroom with dimmed lights. Maybe three or four moments across the runtime where the speakers remembered they had purpose. This wasn’t an auditory experience; it was a contractual obligation. You don’t just waste Dolby. You defile it. You drag the sacred through the dirt and then mumble an apology into your popcorn. Let’s talk plot. It’s a sterile room pretending to be a battlefield. Rami Malek does Rami Malek—brooding, twitching, haunted—but the film forgets to give weight to his ghosts. His wife is fridged before we even get to care, and with her death, the film demands we ride shotgun on a blood quest we have no stake in. There’s a flash of tenderness at the beginning, a saccharine montage too brittle to carry the narrative that follows. Vengeance isn’t an idea—it’s a fever, a rot in the bones. And this movie? It administers Tylenol. It plays coy with its genre. A spy thriller that doesn’t want to get dirty. Scenes that tease tension, only to slip into banality. A sequence echoes Mr. Robot—beautiful paranoia, well-crafted unease—and then fizzles. Another flirts with espionage intrigue, meeting with informants in the dark. Promising. Then discarded. Like it was embarrassed by its own ambition. And then there’s the resurrection. No, not the one you’re thinking of. A character believed dead returns, offers a few lines that carry the emotional density of packing peanuts, and exits again like a fart in the wind. Narrative weight? None. Structural logic? Less than none. This is not storytelling. This is narrative necromancy performed by interns. Let’s talk about the plane. It shows up in the opening scene—a bold, visual symbol perhaps? A metaphor for escape, or fate, or loss? No. It disappears for the entire runtime and comes back in the final moments like a stray cat you forgot you fed once. It’s meant to bookend the story with visual poetry. Instead, it reads like a half-remembered haiku mumbled in a parking lot. The film has ideas. They just forgot to animate them. We are introduced to characters with all the fanfare of a DMV clerk, only for them to vanish like polite hallucinations. Jon Bernthal pops up with all the energy of a man collecting a paycheck. No arc. No tension. Just lines to deliver and a door to exit. He’s not a character. He’s cinematic lint. That’s the true tragedy of The Amateur: it is lint. Shavings of genre, echoes of better films. It is not bad, which is worse—it is safe. It needed fat. It needed sin. It needed mess. Instead, it’s lean to the point of famine. Structure without muscle. Setups without satisfying payoffs. Questions without consequence. You don’t trim the fat out of vengeance. You let it burn, let it char, let it smoke the whole house. Technically, yes, it’s competent. It hits its marks. It doesn’t trip over its own feet. But cinema should do more than walk—it should convulse, lurch, howl. This one, sadly, merely walks in circles. In the end, The Amateur doesn’t fail because it aimed too high. It fails because it aimed for adequacy and hit it. Dead center. And what a boring place to die.
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Production Company
- 20th Century Studios
- Hutch Parker Entertainment
- Joel B. Michaels Productions
Release Date Apr 11, 2025
Duration 2 h 2 m
Rating PG-13
Tagline Don't underestimate him.