Rami Malek May Be Too Weird for Hollywood

Rami Malek won his Oscar for Bohemian Rhapsody in 2019, and ever since, he has idled in a series of increasingly unmemorable roles, from the less grizzled of the two detectives in the odd neo-noir The Little Things to a lesser Bond villain in No Time to Die and then onto a nefarious textile heir in Amsterdam and a small appearance as David L. Hill, one of the sprawling assemblage of physicists in Oppenheimer. This slow fade is the sort of post-acclaim treatment Hollywood has historically reserved for Black women, though in Malek’s case, it feels born more from the industry’s bewilderment about what to do with the 43-year-old star. Bohemian Rhapsody might have been god-awful, but the role of Freddie Mercury was as singular as it was showy — that of an icon who demanded a place for himself in the spotlight through sheer talent and force of will. Dropped back into the realm of material still largely defined by types, Malek’s jittery onscreen energy ends up at odds with characters written in broad strokes.

In The Amateur, a globe-trotting thriller Malek executive-produced and his first true leading role since the one that won him Best Actor, he gives a performance that’s always a beat out of sync with the requirements of what is, under the high-tech gloss, a conventional revenge story. He plays Charles Heller, a brilliant CIA analyst who tries to go from riding a desk to wetworks after his beloved Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan in full ethereal dead-wife mode) is killed in a hostage situation in London. The Amateur, based on Robert Littell’s 1981 novel (and in theaters Friday), calls for the type of nerd who exists only in the movies — the kind who looks like a quarterback who has been put in a pair of glasses and told to stammer on occasion. Malek has the temerity to play the character as a real nerd, which is to say someone who’s not immediately endearing. Charles is soft-spoken and fastidious, a decryption specialist whose life revolves around his work and his wife and who departs from this carefully constructed comfort zone only when it’s ruptured by tragedy.

Early in the film, Charles has a brush at work with a swaggering field agent nicknamed the Bear (Jon Bernthal, unable to escape ursine monikers), and where someone else might play up the character’s barely disguised hero worship, Malek underplays what’s effectively the spy equivalent of a jock asking a mathlete to do his homework. A few sequences later, after he’s informed about what happened to Sarah by CIA directors Moore (Holt McCallany) and O’Brien (Julianne Nicholson), he sits alone sifting through the contents of his wife’s returned suitcase and then plants his face in her things to weep in an odd raw gesture of grief. Malek keeps trying to find the emotional center and dignity of a character who’s pure pulp, and while it’s an admirable effort, it’s also jarringly unsuited to the movie. Then again, director James Hawes — who, aside from 2023’s Nicholas Winton biopic, One Life, has primarily worked in television — also treats his material with a self-seriousness that drags it down. There are occasional blips of fun, like the scene in which Charles pulls up a “How to Pick Locks” YouTube tutorial for help breaking into a Paris apartment. But The Amateur would like to be The Bourne Identity without the fighting — which is to say without the exciting bits. The only time the diminutive Charles, who has no combat training, gets into a physical entanglement, it’s with a woman who more than holds her own.

Half the TV series out today should just have been movies, but The Amateur is a rare example of the reverse with way too much ground to cover for two hours. Charles has to be established at work, then lose his wife, then blackmail his way into condensed field-agent training using compromising material a mysterious asset has passed him, then work with a begrudging Camp Peary general named Henderson (Laurence Fishburne). And only then does he get to the actual business of tracking down the four mercenaries responsible for Sarah’s death — and that’s before we get into the confusing connection between the incident and Charles’s boss, or the former keyboard-manning support guy’s acquisition of a keyboard-manning support guy of his own (a Russian-accented Caitríona Balfe). There’s so much material that The Amateur never has time to dwell on the enjoyable aspects of its own premise, mainly how a man who’s utterly unsuited to the demands of field work learns to use his specific strength, as well as knowledge of the surveillance system he helped build, to evade capture and hunt down a set of professional soldiers scattered around Europe.

Instead, the movie dithers about the cost of killing and what it takes to shoot someone, a tedious question in this context to which it’s incapable of giving any emotional depth despite Malek’s herculean efforts to approach it realistically. He should have saved his energy for something better, if something better actually does come around — and it may not.