- UK release: April 2025
- Director: James Hawes · Writers: Ken Nolan; Gary Spinelli
- Studio / distributor: 20th Century Studios; Hutch Parker Entertainment
- Genre: Espionage revenge thriller · Runtime: 124 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Rami Malek (Mr. Robot, Bohemian Rhapsody) as Charlie Heller; Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix, John Wick) as Robert Henderson; Rachel Brosnahan (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel) as Sarah Heller; Caitríona Balfe (Outlander, Ford v Ferrari) as Inquiline Davies; Jon Bernthal (The Punisher, The Accountant) as the Bear
- IMDb: 6.5 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 61% critics / 87% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
The revenge thriller is one of cinema’s most worn grooves, and the spy version of it is worn smoother still: a man loses the person he loves, the institution shrugs, and he goes off the books to settle accounts with his fists. The Amateur, adapted from Robert Littell’s 1981 novel and directed by James Hawes off the back of his work on Slow Horses, keeps the bones of that template and swaps out the one part that usually matters most. Its avenger cannot fight. Charlie Heller is a CIA cryptographer, a man who reads code and decrypts intercepts in a basement at Langley, and when he sets out after the people who killed his wife he brings the only weapon he actually knows how to use: information.
The setup
Heller (Rami Malek) is a decoder, happiest in front of a screen, married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) and quietly aware that the world outside his terminal is not really his element. When Sarah is killed in a terrorist attack in London and the agency declines to act, partly out of bureaucratic caution and partly because the trail runs into places it would rather not look, Heller does something no field agent could. He has been quietly sitting on intelligence the agency wants buried, and he uses it as leverage, blackmailing his own employers into training him and turning him loose. What follows is a pursuit across Europe in which the hunter is physically outmatched at every turn and wins, where he wins at all, by being cleverer, more patient, and far more comfortable with a keyboard than anyone expects.
The cast
Malek is the reason this works. He has built a career on characters who watch more than they speak, from the hollowed-out hacker of Mr. Robot to his Oscar-winning Freddie Mercury, and here he plays Heller as a man genuinely out of his depth and knowing it. There is no sudden transformation into an action hero. Heller stays anxious, improvises badly, and survives on preparation rather than instinct, and Malek sells that fragility without ever tipping into helplessness. Laurence Fishburne is excellent as Henderson, the reluctant trainer who can see exactly how this ends and trains him anyway, bringing the weary authority he has been perfecting since The Matrix. Rachel Brosnahan has less to do as the murdered wife, though she registers warmly enough in flashback to give the grief some weight, and Caitríona Balfe and Jon Bernthal both make strong impressions in roles the film keeps deliberately shadowy.
The craft
Hawes shoots this with the cool, grey, surveillance-lit texture that Slow Horses fans will recognise, and Martin Ruhe’s cinematography keeps Europe looking handsome without ever turning it into a travel brochure. The set pieces are built around Heller’s mind rather than his body, and the best of them are genuinely inventive: he does not punch his way out of trouble, he engineers it, rigging environments and exploiting systems in ways that feel plausible for a man who thinks in exploits and vulnerabilities. Volker Bertelmann’s score is restrained and tense, the kind of electronic-orchestral hybrid that keeps a low pulse under the technical scenes. It is not flawless. The pacing sags in the middle stretch, where the geography starts to blur and the procedural cleverness has to carry passages the plot does not fully earn, and the revenge structure occasionally falls back on beats you can time to the second.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is The Accountant, another thriller about a numerically gifted loner who turns competence into menace, though The Amateur is the more grounded and less stylised of the two. It sits closer in spirit to the Bourne films than to Bond, sharing their interest in tradecraft and institutional rot, but it pointedly refuses to let its hero become Jason Bourne; the whole appeal is that Heller never acquires those skills. Anyone who enjoyed Slow Horses or Jack Ryan will find a familiar register here, the modern intelligence thriller where the most dangerous thing in the room is a man with the right files. It does not reinvent the form, but it finds one fresh angle on it and commits.
Critics versus the rest of us
The critical reception has been lukewarm, sitting around 61% on Rotten Tomatoes, with most reviewers praising Malek and the analyst-as-avenger premise while complaining that the pacing wanders and the revenge plot offers few surprises. Audiences are noticeably warmer, up at 87%, and I think they have the better of the argument. Critics are right that the structure is familiar and the middle drags, but they undersell how much pleasure there is in watching a thriller whose hero solves problems with intelligence rather than violence. The 6.5 on IMDb feels like the score of people who wanted a more conventional action film and were mildly disappointed not to get one. I wanted exactly this film.
Verdict
I am the target audience for this and I know it. I like espionage, I like surveillance and tradecraft, and I particularly like a protagonist who is an analyst rather than a super-soldier, the rare thriller that treats brains as the headline weapon. The Amateur gives me all of that in a handsome, intelligent, slightly overlong package. The script does not surprise me, the middle could lose fifteen minutes, and the supporting players deserve more room than they get. None of that stops it being exactly the kind of film I will happily put on again, for Malek’s nervy, watchful lead and for the simple satisfaction of a spy who wins with a laptop. 8⁄10.
Availability: In UK cinemas now, on general release from 11 April. One for a proper screen rather than a phone, though it loses little at home.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: The Amateur moved to digital and disc later in 2025 and found a larger, friendlier audience there than its mixed cinema reviews suggested, with the audience score settling well above the critics. It now streams on Disney+ in most regions. Talk of a sequel built around Heller has circulated on the strength of that home-viewing afterlife, which is the right way to extend this character: keep him the reluctant amateur rather than promoting him into the field agent the first film so carefully refused to make him.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat, language. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: People are shot with guns, with minimal bloody detail resulting.
Threat and horror: Armed terrorists take hostages at a hotel, holding civilians at gunpoint.
Language: There is use of moderate bad language (‘prick’), as well as milder terms such as ‘shit’, ‘asshole’, ‘screw’, ‘ass’, ‘damn’, ‘God’, ‘hell’ and ‘Jesus’.
Suicide and self-harm: There are undetailed references to suicide bomber attacks.
Theme: A person grieves for the loss of his spouse following her death.
Alcohol and smoking: Adults drink alcohol.
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
