Rami Malek shines as vengeful spy in The Amateur

The Oscar winner lifts a story too afraid to embrace its premise of an incompetent agent

- John Lui

THE AMATEUR (PG13) 122 minutes, opens on April 10 ★★★★☆

The story: Charlie Heller (Rami Malek) has a desk job with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a specialist in signals intelligence. After his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) is killed in a terrorist attack, he tries to convince his bosses to take quick and decisive action. To his dismay, they drag their feet. When he asks for permission to carry out operations on his own, his handlers tell him it would be suicidal. He does so anyway, using his skills in IT and codebreaking to find the killers and evade his employers. The film is based on the 1981 novel of the same title by Robert Littell.

A glance at the trailer gives viewers a fairly accurate idea of The Amateur's premise, which asks: "What if Jason Bourne were a nerd?" A variant might be, "What if Liam Neeson's angry dad in Taken (2008) was an IT guy?"