In 'The Amateur,' Mr. Printer Fixer Goes Full Galt After His Wife Gets Fridged

The Amateur is the latest overly serious Bourne knock off to be inflicted on theater goers. I preferred it when every other action movie was a Die Hard knock off if only because the succession of Die Hard on a Boat, Die Hard on a Space Station, Die Hard on a Train, Die Hard on a Taco Truck had creativity of place.

The Bourne clones all try to vary on the twist of the protagonist’s identity, which is nowhere near as interesting. They all look and feel the same because it doesn’t matter what your murder hobo’s first act back story is once they’re all just wandering around random European cities blowing shit up while they’re sad and being chased by other professional murder hobos.

Bourne but he’s a Nerd doesn’t do anything we haven’t seen 16 times before and certainly doesn’t do them better. It turns out that arbitrary techno nightclubs in Marseilles untz untz untzs in the dark about the same regardless of whether the murder dude with too many passports is a tech whiz or an amnesiac.

Rami Malek stars as the quiet nerdy guy who obviously works at the CIA and is super crazy tech savvy. You can tell this because he uses six monitors at once, types really fast, wears glasses, and is bullied into fixing a crazy hot dirtied up Jon Bernthal’s printer over his lunch break. Don’t worry, you don’t see Bernthal again for most of the movie. Because why would we want a movie about this guy, right?

Anyway, Rami’s wife gets fridged, and he takes it upon himself to go kill the bad guys. Rachel Brosnahan is wasted as the obligatory perfect wonderful amazing beautiful wife who serves as the aforementioned fridgee in order for the plot to happen. She shows up constantly in flashbacks and imagined somber encounters in passing just so that you cannot possibly forget why Rami is running around committing felonies. Seriously, if her character were in the movie any more, it’d legally be required to be classified as a ghost movie.

There’s a whole thing about corrupt CIA officials looking the other way for, I don’t know, I zoned out during their half ass plagiarism of Colonel Jessup’s justifications for being murder dicks. Bottom line, the guys who are supposed to do their job won’t, so Mr. Printer Fixer has to go out into the field as an avenging angel while being hunted by his own side.

He can’t shoot and is bad at basically everything an international man of mystery should be good at, but he is good at tech stuff, which means that he can hack into anything with electrons, sneak across international borders with impunity, watch any camera feed anywhere in the world from any phone, build bombs out of whatever he can find in random bathrooms, install bugs that somehow transmit out of secure facilities to his earbud anywhere in the world, and I mean, I could go on but it’s just fucking stupid at some point, isn’t it?

It’s so over the top that it had the makings of a comedy, if it didn’t take itself so incredibly over the top seriously. There is not one moment of poking fun at itself or taking a beat to just laugh at the absurdity of the entire situation. Rami Malek’s acting ability is also wasted since his only stage direction was to sleepwalk through the death of his wife as if channeling Eeyore at all times. A movie should not take itself this seriously unless it is about orphaned dogs with cancer featuring a Sarah McLachlan soundtrack.

The movie creepily fetishizes the insane American surveillance state and its ability to technically worm into anything and everything around the world. But even as it winds its tendrils after the protagonist, it is only seen as a cool tool for him to triumphantly co-opt because he’s even better at the tech than his coworkers. The movie has a full chubby for Orwellian techno-fascism, and its only critique is that the state isn’t murdering the right people in the streets. And when that happens, there’s nothing for a hero to do but go Galt and blow a few buildings. Don’t worry, he gets his job back at the end and nothing changes except cycling out who gets to put names on the murder list.

The Amateur has ample talent and budget to be a decent movie if it had at any point decided to be anything but exactly what it is. It could have been comical with some ease, it could have been a vehicle for Bernthal (or a more present but equally wasted Laurence Fishbourne) helping the guy in over his head through everything. It could have been a running commentary on the American intelligence industrial complex’s infiltration into everything. But instead, it just plays as a straight, overly serious Bourne rip-off that is too stupid to be a thriller and too somber to be entertaining.