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‘The Amateur’ Review: Rami Malek Is a CIA Analyst Turned Avenger in a Thriller More By-the-Code Than It Looks
Rami Malek is a mad-as-hell secret-agent geek brainiac in a watchable but frictionless revenge film that pours a lot of other movies into the blender.
Charlie Heller ( Rami Malek), the mad-as-hell secret-agent geek brainiac at the center of “ The Amateur,” is a CIA analyst who works five floors underground at Langley, in the Decryption and Analysis department. Even as he skips from Paris to Marseille to Istanbul to the Baltic Coast, chasing after the criminals who are some sort of freelance weapons brokers for bad nation states, he is still, in a certain sense, behind that desk, hacking and manipulating, executing his hand-made traps, though what this mostly makes you feel is that he’s seen a lot of movies. It’s directed, with anonymous efficiency, by James Hawes, a British television director who’s helmed episodes of “Doctor Who,” and the script, by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli (based on the novel by Robert Littell), keeps throwing things at us.
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