It is not uncommon to hear that cinema has become an expensive hobby and the public to choose the films capable of making them vibrate in an obscure room. Blockbuster or not, it is important that the spectator has for his money, especially with the harsh competition of streaming platforms. Ideally at least. Because in reality, we no longer count the productions that simply seek to slide your hand directly into your wallet, regardless of the quality of the said product. Minecraftif you read us.
This is to say that there are sometimes also feature films that we would have seen more in a hole in a platform catalog, rather than risking risky bet on the big screen, where the return on investment is much more difficult. We cannot bet on the success or not of The Amateur at the box office, and we will always advise you to give a film to the movies a chance (except In The Lost Lands), but when the end of the end of end, the question is inevitable: does it really have a chance to shine in a dark room?
Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) is a CIA cryptographer Stuck in the fifth basement of Langley, far from the theater of operations. Introverted, he leads a quiet existence with his wife (Rachel Brosnahan, future Lane Looms) until the day when the latter is the collateral victim of an attack in London. Faced with a hierarchy that refuses to act, Heller will use his intelligence to find the trace of the culprits. Despite a meager field formation, he will go against his superiors and start his quest for revenge himself throughout Europe.
Mourning in the skin
The Amateur appreciates for its less conventional approach to action cinema. We can say that everything is in the title. Charlie Heller is the personification of Mister Toutlemonde who sees little daylight, daily stuck behind his screen. For once, the choice of Rami Malek is obvious as the actor is not imposing and is more anti-heroes, even bad as in the last James Bond. On paper, his mission has no chance of success. It only takes two scenes with Jon Bernthal, an actor accustomed to adrenaline playing here a field agent, to mark the major difference in confidence and physics that separates them.
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Carried by this atypical protagonist, The film is not going to combine the clichés of the genre Where a Jason Statham would stack the extras as in Mikado. Heller is a cerebral and his mission is above all a way of facing his mourning and reaffirming himself, of existing again without his half. The Amateur does not want to chain crazy sequences, but push for reflection while using codes specific to action cinema. Shootings, races, explosions, fights … The repertoire is there, in the hands of a man who does not know how to act and react. The interest of The Amateur is not his muscular side, he is in his human part.
A big screen a little too big
The examples are not lacking in series that today want to play on the cinema field with episodes often presenting themselves like mini-films. Where the border between the two formats was marked at one time, television productions tended to come to borrow from long formats, to the point of simply having the impression of a film cut into several pieces. The failure of The Amateur is to be the exact opposite. We are faced with a cinematographic work seeming to scream his desire to be reassembled in six or eight episodes one hour.
The artistic direction transpires the desire of the other format with sequences visibly designed to last longer, but caught up by the need to advance in the story. The whole story seems to want to go beyond the framework with scenes calling for a longer exploration around the characters. A widow wishing to feel human warmth again, a director struggling to control her agency, there is no shortage of examples between the words not said and the images not shown, as interrupted. The Amateur is an accumulation of sketches Within a real ambition achievement.
This gives an impression of narrative generosity hampered by multiple script shortcuts, as a training sent in the blink of an eye, an elaborate plan which we barely detect the development, characters who teleport and Jon Bernthal who hardly needed more than a day of filming for his scenes. The last half hour begins and we have the feeling of being only at the beginning of history. The resolution arrives like a hair on the soup, because it does not seem obvious at that time of the plot, but simply necessary. There was a fall at the end of the joke.
The Amateur is the answer given to all those who wonder why Mr Robot lasted 45 episodes, The Night Agent 10 episodes (for season 1) or the 10 episodes of The Day of the Jackal. We could not just say who is the most frustrated in the situation between the spectator, the director James Hawes, the writers Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, or the editor Jonathan Amos.
Thriller amateur
Especially since if we congratulate the film, inspired by Robert Led’s novel, to want Redefine the figure of the hero of the spy feature filmwe should not hide the overall construction of the story. If, action level, we dodge the stereotypes, with regard to the thriller, we are right in it, both feet forward. No element of the plot will upset our genre conception with the compulsory classic-classic passages. A forgivable phenomenon as soon as we also know that the thriller tends to catch up with this flaw by its atmosphere and the construction of the characters. Except that concerning the latter, this is precisely the problem highlighted a little higher. The Amateur Leave with the best intentions in the world, and then there was the execution … when you were told that everything was in the title.
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