You’ve seen Bourne Supremacy and Bourne Ultimatum. Now strap in for Bourne Yesterday.
Meet Charlie Heller (Bohemian Rhapsody’s Rami Malek), a man who embarks on a mission of revenge with precisely none of the lethal skills he’ll need to carry it out. Not only can he not disarm an assassin with a rolled-up magazine or kill a man with a hand towel, the guy needs a YouTube video to help him break into a mark’s apartment.
That rare moment of levity runs against the grain of this straight-faced but enjoyably slick espionage thriller from director James Hawes. The British filmmaker is a veteran of Slow Horses, and while The Amateur lacks the rumpled élan and meticulous characterisation of the Gary Oldman streaming hit, it does deliver some of the same knottiness and unpredictability.
Its ‘slow horse’, Heller, is a CIA codebreaker and surveillance genius who’s allowed out of Langley’s sub-basement level for lunch breaks with his geeky work mates and not much else. Certainly not to defy his hulking Agency chief (Holt McCallany) and go on a one-man mission to avenge his wife (Rachel Brosnahan), murdered in a black-ops raid on a London hotel.
Asking you not to dwell on the massive coincidence that Heller’s otherwise unconnected wife has been randomly killed by privately contracted agents with direct links to his employers 5000 miles away, Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli’s screenplay (an update of Robert Littell’s 1981 novel) sets Heller on an off-the-books, trans-European mission to track down – and kill – the four shady figures behind her death.
You’ve seen Bourne Supremacy. Now strap in for Bourne Yesterday
No one expects him to last long – least of all the hard-bitten CIA specialist (Laurence Fishburne, cool AF) assigned to show him one end of a handgun from another – but Heller has smarts and improvisational skills. Soon he’s attempting to kill one of his marks with a bag of pollen and another, in the standout set piece, with a jerry-rigged sky pool explosion. He may not be a killer, but he’s very good at making fatal accidents happen.
It’s a smart notion that the closer Heller gets to his targets, the less capable he becomes, and the claustrophobic locations – Marseille and Istanbul, especially – keep the walls closed in and the tension cranked up. Hawes smartly eschews the famous landmarks to send his hero to bustling back alleys, dank nightclubs and menacing docksides.
Malek’s twitchy brand of anti-charm makes him an unusual lead for a film like this, and his outsider energy works better as the tormented killer-to-be than the doting husband. Heller is not always easy to root for, which can make The Amateur a chilly experience.
Lovers of old-school espionage thrillers and anyone raised on Littell and le Carré’s Cold War yarns won’t mind a jot.
In cinemas worldwide Apr 11.