The Amateur review – extremely solid, extremely unspectacular

Imagine The Bourne Identity but Jason Bourne is a basement-dwelling weeb. Rami Malek stars as that weeb in James Hawes’ blithely underwhelming espionage time-passer, The Amateur. Charlie Heller is a speccy CIA data encryption operative whose idyllic wife (Rachel Brosnahan) is whacked by international terrorists while on a work away-day in London. Rather than just be allowed to stew in his little windowless office on floor minus 5 of the CIA HQ in Langley, he decides he wants to man up and – all together now! – off the men who brutally executed his other half.

Initially he’s laughed out of the room by brawny higher-ups who are playing their own black-ops games and instigating secret wars in the name of American security. But the threat of blowing the whistle gets Charlie out of the building and into a field agent training programme with old hand Col Henderson (Laurence Fishburne; think Morpheus in cargo pants). While our keyboard hero is no good when it comes to the physical and moral act of shooting to kill, his sizable IQ makes him a dab hand when it comes to improvised explosives and digital tracing technology, and so off he trots on a tour of continental Europe to find some elaborately-mounted retribution.

Based on a 1981 work by veteran spy novelist Robert Littell, The Amateur plays like a standard-issue tech thriller where Charlie is somehow able to bug or hack any device for his own advantage. If you’re wearing a Fitbit, he can make your arm blow up. OK, so that’s maybe overstretching it a little, but it’s a film where the dramatic stakes are massively decreased due to this overwhelming digital omnipotence, where the tension in every scene dissipates once you realise that Charlie’s already locked in some jiggary-poker on his laptop beforehand.

There’s an air of seriousness to proceedings, which ends up making some of the more exotic modes of death rather tonally conspicuous. One terrorist mark is trapped inside an oxygen tank and her severe allergies are used against her with the cruel administering of excess pollen into her system. There’s another set-piece that’ll have you shifting away from the infinity pools in deluxe hotels, especially since we’re shown how easy it is to make them collapse (all you need is a Henry Hoover).

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. And once you’ve gotten past the “little nerd who can” conceit, there’s very little here to chew on.