The Amateur (2025) Dir: James Hawes

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When the trailers dropped for this James Hawes directed thriller, I thought it looked like a pretty standard revenge flick. My feelings of relative apathy towards it only intensified when it's critical and audience reception was decidedly average. As such, this film was condemned to the list of films I would wait to watch until they were readily available to stream. I kept my expectations suitably tempered - I was hoping the action would be worth the wait, at the very least.

Unfortunately, this was a prime example of a trailer telling its audience way too much about the film before it comes out. The trailers for this one told me essentially everything about the narrative and its characters before I'd seen it. It's a big shame, because it made the film even more predictable than it already was. I don't think a single event in the film caught me remotely off-guard.

Matters weren't helped by the fact that it took almost an hour for the first significant action of the film to take place. Even the inciting incident happened off-screen, which felt like a major misstep. What this meant was that the entire first half of the film was incredibly dull, slow, and uneventful. The action, once it finally got going, was actually fairly good, albeit the relevant scenes were far too brief, and far too few and far between, to really make this feel like much of a positive.

The narrative did nothing particularly new either. It wasn't a bad story, per-se, but it felt like it was riffing off of a lot of other films, like the Bourne and Taken franchises, for example. I wish the first half had at least been more interesting, because it would have made the viewing experience far more palatable, despite the film's aforementioned predictability. There were good scenes in this film, but not enough of them, and not close enough together for it to make a more complete-feeling film.

I found Rami Malek's leading performance really odd. He somehow had lots of, and not enough, charisma for the role, which meant that half the time he looked and felt the part, and the other he felt extremely out of place. Perhaps that was partly by design, but I must say, I often find this, or something similar, to be the case with Malek. Maybe he's just not my kind of actor. I don't dislike him, but his performances rarely impress me to a significant degree.

There were three commendable performances from the supporting cast, each making the film at least a little more watchable. The most notable being that of Caitríona Balfe, who honestly deserved a lot more screentime, and whose character felt done dirty and far-too-easily dispensed with. The other two names I wanted to gibe particular credit to were that of Holt McCallany, who I always find to be a consistent face, and the iconic Laurence Fishburne, who, whilst not at his best, was definitely watchable. Quick mentions should also go to the likes of Danny Sapani, Rachel Brosnahan, Michael Stuhlbarg, Julianne Nicholson, and Jon Bernthal, to varying degrees, for their respective performances. Some of them were definitely underutilised, but their acting was sound.

Overall, this was a pretty mediocre revenge thriller, which underutilised its positive features, and left it far too late to get interesting. Unfortunately, it committed the cardinal sin of being boring for the entirety of its first half, and despite the second half being much better, it was already too late by that point. This was less 'Jason Bourne' and more 'Jason Bored'. I digress, this was definitely one of the more forgettable films I've seen this year, and one I won't likely watch again.