Of the 11 movies I watched on those six flights -- including one repeat viewing -- The Amateur was not the worst. That dishonor goes to The Avengers -- not Joss Whedon's 2012 Avengers, mind you, but the 1998 one starring Ralph Fiennes and Uma Thurman, about John Steed and Emma Peel. Yesterday I mentioned that I rarely deviate from a certain philosophy of movie watching on planes ... well, this was one of those rare deviations. I thought "When the hell else am I going to watch this movie?" And to be honest, I was exhausted and did not want to watch another taxing movie, after the last three I watched were all in a foreign language -- or at least required subtitles, since I decided to turn them on for the Australian prison drama Inside, just to make sure I understood everything.
Where was I? Oh yeah, The Amateur.
It was not the worst of the 11 movies, but it only avoided that outcome by the skin of its teeth.
Let me count the ways I did not like this movie, before leading up to the subject of this post:
1) It's basically a spy movie, in that it exists in the world of CIA operatives and analysts. I don't like spy movies.
2) It's also a revenge thriller. There have certainly been plenty of good revenge thrillers, but this became a tired excuse for a movie a long time ago.
3) It's also a revenge thriller where the protagonist's wife, played by Rachel Brosnahan, gets fridged in the first ten minutes of the movie. I thought we didn't do fridging anymore, especially fridged wives or girlfriends. But I checked, and indeed, The Amateur was released in 2025.
4) It's also a revenge thriller where the protagonist's fridged wife is listed second in the credits, meaning either she's not actually dead, or that she's going to appear in enough gauzy flashbacks, designed purely to sentimentalize their relationship and cement the righteousness of the protagonist's revenge, to warrant that high placement within the credits. Unfortunately, it's the latter.
5) It's also a revenge thriller where the protagonist, played by Rami Malek, is supposed to be a "normal guy" who gets in over his head.
The problem is, Rami Malek cannot play a normal guy.
There are plenty of roles Rami Malek can play. If you don't recognize that name and are still not clicking in from the poster above, Rami Malek won an Oscar for playing Freddie Mercury. Who was not, you'll remember, a normal guy. He's also been a Bond villain, among other similarly ostentatious roles.
Normal guy? Rami Malek cannot play that.
It's something about the eyes, I think. I'm not going to say Malek is unattractive, but his eyes have a certain reptilian quality that prevents him from just blending into the crowd of any old person you pass on the street. Malek has a distinctive appearance that is not soon forgotten.
And the idea about most normal guys is that you soon forget them.
So I guess technically, Malek's Charlie Heller is not purely "normal." He's a bit of a savant in that he's very good at his job as a CIA cryptographer. You wouldn't reserve the word "normal" for a person of his brainpower.
But the whole idea is that he's not a killer or a traditional vigilante, who has the necessary hand-to-hand combat skills or weapons skills to make an effective hunter of the assailants who killed his wife. The role calls for him to be "normal" in the sense of being physically unimposing and generally unmemorable.
Really, he's "normal" in the sense that you could see Jimmy Stewart or Cary Grant playing this role if the movie were made 60 years ago. I'm choosing those two names specifically because they have both appeared in films directed by Alfred Hitchcock, who was known for putting "normal" people into situations that they either could not fully comprehend or were not fully prepared to deal with. They were everyman heroes who we cheered because we hoped we'd manage similarly to how they managed, coming up with enough unlikely desperate cleverness or resourcefulness not to die in the situations in which they find themselves. They remind us of us.
Rami Malek does not remind us of us.
And you'd think that a good actor, as Malek has proven himself to be, would be able to rise to this challenge. Rather than looking like a chameleon -- I tell you, it's those eyes -- he'd be the chameleon any actor should be, and become this normal person when the role requires it.
But it was funny to see how Malek struggles with the basic and seemingly simple requirements of such a role. His reaction to learning that has wife has died has an odd disconnected quality to it. Malek certainly seems like he wants to play that reaction differently to how we've seen it played most often, but in doing so, he only underscores how little he seems like an everyman, making, at one point, a sort of alien gasp that at best reminds us of an extra terrestrial imitating a human.
If Malek can only play "weirdos" -- to be reductive in our description of his filmography -- is he even, then, an actor worth watching?
Oh sure. There are plenty of people we want to watch because they are weirdos, and the weirder the better.
But if you think of some of our more gonzo actors -- Nicolas Cage of course comes to mind, but then I also thought of Gary Oldman -- those actors are distinguished by the fact that they can be normal, when they want to be. For a time, Cage even seemed like he wanted to play the role of traditional dramatic or romantic lead, as he did in such films as The Weather Man or The Family Man.
Nicolas Cage might be a true chameleon. Rami Malek might only look like one.
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