‘The Amateur’ is reminiscent of ‘The Fugitive’ in terms of giving us a professional who tries to do what the authorities are unable (or unwilling) to achieve and hunt down the killer of his wife. Rami Malek may not be, unlike Harrison Ford in the 90s psychological thriller classic, the suspect, but he is no different from Dr. Richard Kimble by way of having an unquenchable and non-negotiable appetite for seeking justice, and having to use renegade means to do so as his intelligence colleagues at the CIA in Langley, Virginia, where he works as an encryptor, seem to have an ulterior motive in not exactly jumping at the chance to track down the killers.

While this is fundamentally a revenge thriller, in which the righteous hero gets to act as vigilante and track down and kill those who get in the way of his crusade, Malek is also the innocent on the run, a trope familiar from Hitchcock classics like ‘The Wrong Man’ and ‘North By Northwest’, here with the twist that the good guys at the CIA really are the bad guys, and Malek has to fight against those in his own organization who want to silence him before he can finally kill those responsible for his wife’s barbaric assassination. The other twist is in presenting Malek’s character as an amateur for we realize before long that he has a unique set of skills which show he really is a dark force in his own organization who knows where to look when no one else does.

He is overlooked at the CIA where he is just perceived as a nerdy guy who spends his time deciphering clues on computers, but he knows enough to be able to turn the tables on his bosses and outflank them, managing to solve the puzzle that they are so keen to prevent him from discovering. Before long, we start to suspect that Malek knows more than he lets on, and this has implausibilities, too, as even if he is a quick learner we know from a conversation with his wife at the start that he has never travelled much and doesn’t seem especially keen to do anything resembling physical acts of espionage, let alone have the ability to kill.

He is before long a slick, ingenious killer who stages impossible feats involving detonations, asphyxiations and even causing a hotel to collapse so that the man swimming on his own on the top floor can plunge to an extravagantly plotted death (an act that is bound to lead to multiple other fatalities). Yet, we can plausibly believe that he has a single-minded mission to seek restitution for the death of his wife, and that he is acting on adrenaline and is more resourceful than anyone had even bothered to notice. He is in this respect not fundamentally different from Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in ‘North By Northwest’ by being an ‘ordinary’ man thrown into an extraordinary situation and having to learn the hard way how to ‘become’ somebody else if he is to have a fighting chance of surviving the ordeal.

There is something eminently relatable about the ordinary Joe who steps outside of their comfort zone and outflanks and outmanoeuvres everyone else in the process, and we can at least admire his commitment to a cause and in honouring the legacy of his late wife even though the odds against him succeeding are so low. Indeed, we can perhaps relate to the way Malek knows that he has nothing to lose.