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Rami Malek May Be Too Weird for Hollywood
In spy thriller The Amateur, the Oscar winner and his pulpy material can’t get along.
Rami Malek won his Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody in 2019, and ever since, he has idled in a series of increasingly unmemorable roles, from the less grizzled of the two detectives in the odd neo-noir The Little Things to a lesser Bond villain in No Time to Die and then onto a nefarious textile heir in Amsterdam and a small appearance as David L. Hill, one of the sprawling assemblage of physicists in Oppenheimer. Early in the film, Charles has a brush at work with a swaggering field agent nicknamed the Bear (Jon Bernthal, unable to escape ursine monikers), and where someone else might play up the character’s barely disguised hero worship, Malek underplays what’s effectively the spy equivalent of a jock asking a mathlete to do his homework. There’s so much material that The Amateur never has time to dwell on the enjoyable aspects of its own premise, mainly how a man who’s utterly unsuited to the demands of field work learns to use his specific strength, as well as knowledge of the surveillance system he helped build, to evade capture and hunt down a set of professional soldiers scattered around Europe.
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