BY ROGER WATSON

Based on the 1981 novel of the same name by Robert Littell, The Amateur (2025) tells the improbable story of a geek turned gunman in pursuit of his wife’s killers. It is an action, suspense thriller and, as such, is diverting enough, but is probably scored accurately at 61% on Rotten Tomatoes. At times it is a bit lacking in action, and you must watch very carefully to follow the storyline.

The lead role of Charlie Heller is played by Rami Malek, who portrayed Freddie Mercury brilliantly in Bohemian Rhapsody and whose CV includes a list of very familiar titles. I especially liked the supporting role he played in the 2017 remake of Papillon. He is ideal in the present role, as – with the exception of Freddie Mercury – he tends to play enigmatic, introverted characters.

Heller is a cryptographer with the CIA. While online in a secure area of the building where he works, deep down in the basement, he receives messages from an anonymous source which suggest some nefarious CIA activities of which he should be aware. He is engaged in a game of trying to identify the source’s location. He guesses Istanbul, and it turns out he is right.

Heller’s wife leaves for a conference in England, and we get some insight into his home life. He is very happily married. But, called to his director’s office, he is told there has been a terrorist incident in London during which his wife has been killed. He is shown some footage to prove this and, with his computer skills, can dig deeper on his own into the circumstances of his wife’s death.

The setting for the conference his wife was attending was the St Pancras Hotel (given a different name in the film), and his wife is executed by one of the terrorists in the car park at the front on Euston Road. Malek has the identity of the members of the gang of terrorists and, armed with his inside knowledge of some shady goings-on under the auspices of the CIA, he blackmails his boss into allowing him to undergo the training necessary to hunt and kill the terrorists.

Heller is unable to hit the back of the proverbial bus with a 9mm pistol, but he excels at bomb making. His trainer, a Colonel Robert Henderson played by Laurence Fishburne (he’s in all these films), ascertains that Heller would never be capable of shooting anyone. Henderson receives orders to eliminate Heller due to the danger he poses to the CIA, but Heller escapes and begins to hunt his wife’s killers.

As is usual with these films, the action moves quickly between international locations. Nobody ever seems to have jet lag, and they swing into action the minute their planes touch down in some new location. After a detour through France – where one terrorist is struck by a car and killed, and Heller escapes from an encounter with Henderson, who had tracked him down – the action moves to Istanbul.

The scenes in Istanbul, for anyone familiar with the city, are wonderfully shot. He locates his informant, a woman, and with her help traces two further terrorists to Spain and Romania. They are imaginatively dispatched as Heller is still unable to pull the trigger himself. None of the terrorists killed so far is the one who shot his wife, but he does manage to locate him on a boat on the Baltic Sea.

The final terrorist knows he is being followed and, with a trusty old cinematic thump to the back of the head, Heller is knocked unconscious and taken to the boat on the Baltic. To cut a short story even shorter, Heller ends up in possession of a pistol and is holding it to the forehead of his wife’s killer. The question now is: can he pull the trigger?

You will have to watch the film to find out. Whatever the outcome, Heller is still on a boat full of terrorists. But he has managed to hack the boat’s navigation system so that, unbeknownst to its occupants, it ends up in Finnish waters. All I could think was, “pull the other one.”

The Amateur has its moments, both slow and intriguing. While it is hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff, it is very well acted, and I would probably watch it again.

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Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.