Based on a novel of the same name by Robert Littell, Two of the major conflicts in The Amateur are literally intertwined in the first act. One involves the illegal activities followed by a coverup that some officials of the CIA are involved in, and the second involving Sarah being killed off in a hostage-like situation at her hotel during an overseas assignment. Both these plot-points are directly linked to Heller, with one conflict being personal, and the other professional. The single thought in his mind is of revenge, and of the urge to hunt each of the four assailants down, for which he does request the officials in question, only to turn rogue when they refuse. Hence clearly, The Amateur borrows the principal ideas from films like Taken (2008) while being quite generic with its treatment when it treads the waters of an espionage thriller. The fault lies entirely in the predictability of the plot that doesn’t venture into a zone of unforeseen events at any given point of time.

The proceedings are the most watchable with the writing chooses to focus on the mild politics in the drama, that threatens to shift the power dynamics with respect to its characters. The punch-up technique implied is decently effective even as you witness Heller unraveling a secret, whose strings are attached to a recent attack that transpires in the film. The implications of the plot-point are huge given its co-relation to the geo-politics in play, something that would have been an exciting proposition and a different take on the usual revenge drama. Unfortunately, the writing purely reduces the drama to a simple two-fold cat and mouse chase between Heller, the authorities and the people that Heller is about to hunt down, which makes the drama rather vanilla.

The drama briefly flirts with the character dynamics between Heller and a number of characters. A few of them include his tryst with Hendo (Lawrence Fishburne) and Inquiline (Caitriona Balfe), but literally both these characters are treated as catalysts in the plot, with each of them directly linked to each of the two conflicts in the drama. At a point, the drama is so fleeting with its approach that it just wishes to zoom past multiple plot-points, while never once wishing to pause and invest in the emotional core of the film. This remains one of the biggest letdowns of the film because I wasn’t invested in the pain and agony of the protagonist. In fact at one point, the underlying motive of the protagonist completely disappeared in the wake of his own vulnerabilities to hunt the perpetrators.

I must admit that some of the deaths that were orchestrated did make for an interesting watch. But, because there were no emotions tagged to them, and the stakes in the drama was never raised, the proceedings just felt mid and half-cooked. After a point, you just knew that the protagonist was invincible, a trait that was opposite to the underlying tone of the drama that was cerebral, moody and understated. The suspension of disbelief was an increasingly opposite trait that didn’t necessarily go with the tone of the drama, wherein the results of a few events were directly jumped onto, without moments being invested in how the protagonist managed to ‘hack’ the system. This is true for all major knee-jerk events of death including the half-baked finale that felt decent with its setting but nothing beyond that. And that did sum up the screenplay that was amateur at best while never transitioning into a ‘banger’ category!