Amateur Hour

The Amateur (2025) is sort of another Nobody, except sort of in reverse. Rami Malek is a spy, but a nerdy codebreaker and IT security type with no fighting skills - until he's pushed too far.

We meet Malek and his wife Rachel Brosnahan just as she's leaving for a conference in London. He would go too, but he's sort of scared of flying. That's why his wife gave him a broken down Cessna to fix, which will conquer his fear (?). He heads to work at Langley, where he spends a little time bantering online with the mysterious Inquiline. Inqy sends him some clues that show his boss is disguising drone attacks as suicide bombings.

Then the news comes. There was an attack on the conference, and Malek's wife was taken hostage and killed. Malek demands that his bosses get him some field training and let him go after them. He has used his online skills to identify the killers. When they refuse to let him go, he blackmails them with the suicide bomber false flags. So they send him to train with Laurence Fishburne.

This training mainly serves to show that Malek can't hit the broad side of a barmaid at point blank range. Meanwhile, his bosses are trying to track down the incriminating files. When they fail, they notice thart Malek has taken off to Europe already. 

So now he has to kill three skilled terrorists without being able to fight or shoot a gun. The takedowns are pretty epic, although there aren't that many of them. Of course, when Fishburne shows up to help, as well as Inquiline, plus Jon Bernthal, a cool superspy that Malek did some IT work for, we get a few more fighters on the board. 

I'll spoil the last one - when Malek finds the final boss on a yacht in the Baltic sea, he jiggers the navigation to take them into Finnish waters and lets Interpol and EU immigration handle it.

I found this fun but kind of slight. There weren't a lot of fights, or hacking either. But Malek and the rest of the cast were good, which made up for a lot. My main issue is the laughably outdated idea that false-flagging drone strikes could be used as blackmail material. Now, that would be just another day. 

In conclusion, it looks like this is a remake of a 1981 Canadian movie starring John Savage. Any good?