The Amateur (2025)

Plot of The Amateur: Charlie Heller is a CIA computer man, working in the depths of Langley. He is happily married and his wife is a businesswoman who travels internationally. He receives intel from an unknown source revealing CIA involvement black ops. His life changes when he sees a video from a terrorist attack where his wife is executed by a masked man outside a hotel in London. He assembles information identifying the killer and his team, but the CIA do not wish to take action. Hence in order to take on the villains himself he blackmails his bosses into having him trained as an assassin by Col Henderson, where he fails as a marksman, but excels as a bomb maker, and thereafter takes off after the villains, using his ingenuity to overcome them one at a time, all the time getting closer to his wife’s killer. On the way he meets his source of intel in Turkey, who turns out to be the wife of a former KGB man who had been terminated by his own side. Together they are forced to go on the run, she being killed in the pursuit, leaving Charlie to meet his fate in eastern Europe.

Content: No sex or nudity, or smoking or drugs, but a bit of drinking since meetings take place in bars. Charlie seems to have a loving relationship with his young wife and at work in the Langley basement taps his keyboards and interprets coded messages. Once in revenge mode he spends time being trained as a killer by Henderson, a gruff but effective agent. There are four villains now scattered in Europe so Charlie does some travelling. He first goes to Paris where he attempts to kill Gretchen the female terrorist, failing, although she is run down in traffic. He moves on to Madrid where he kills a further terrorist and then moves on to Turkey but the CIA have sent a team after him to kill him, and it is there at his contact is killed in a hail of gunfire.  There is more.

A View: I like spy films, but this one not so much. Most have heroes who are extremely clever, although we know that actually it is the scriptwriters who are actually being clever, probably the best being the Bourne trilogy. However, this outing seemed to require the villains to live in certain ways which allowed Charlie to kill them. I sort of went along with it until he was in a car being chased by a boat, straight out of James Bond. The film cost a lot and up to now has not nearly recovered its  production costs. So something you might have on for nothing while doing something else, when it comes out on cable.

Fun Fact: Robert Littell wrote the script for the 1981 film before writing the novel from which this movie was developed.