3 Short Paragraphs (Or Not): The Amateur

2025, James Hawes (Slow Horses) -- Disney

Because of his association with Slow Horses, I was expecting a more gritty, dialed down feel to the movie, but Hawes was a director, not the show runner, so his thumb-print on the series is more about the handling of the details, than the tone. In this rote espionage thriller, the details are handled more than competently, giving us an almost early-2000s  "based on the novels by _____" movie, which... well, is based on the novel by Robert Littell. Littell's books were cold war era CIA spy stories, and I am kind of surprised they hadn't been milked for the aforementioned era of movies.

Anywayz. It was fine, but I shouldn't have let it sit and stew for so long.

Charlie Heller (Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody) is one of the smart guys behind the keyboard at the CIA -- a cryptographer. He's seen as unequalled in his job. He also seems to have a side project where he makes contact with an asset named "Inquiline" and they turn over highly encrypted documents to him that implicate his own boss. He hides that shit.

Soon after, his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan, Superman) who has gone to London on a business trip, is killed by terrorists. My first thought, based on seeing a ton of these movies and TV shows, is that he didn't hide the shit well enough and his bosses had his wife killed as a preemptive warning. But no, it was just some international terrorists who got cornered and she was an innocent bystander. Well, not just any random terrorists, but it was not a 2 + 2 = 4 situation.

She was Charlie's world. He is entirely lost without her. In his grief, he formulates a plan. He will blackmail his own superiors into training & outfitting him, so he can go to Europe and find the terrorists that killed his wife. Find them and kill them. They reluctantly comply, with their own plan to find Charlie's evidence and then have him eliminated. They honestly don't expect him to get very far.

Of course, nothing goes exactly to plan, but... the movie does roll out exactly to form.

Normally when I say a movie just (just?) follows a formula, I am being derisive. But in the viewing of this movie, it did more than that. Whereas formulaic action or adventure flicks provide me as much nutritional value as popcorn, followed by a burp and they're gone, these middle of the road thrillers usually leave me quite satisfied. I always like the structured details, the settings, the characters. I think back to the 90s movies like The Firm or The Pelican Brief. They were never critically acclaimed, but they always more than satisfied. I like the way the main character is played, I like how he adjusts to the change in scope on his Hero's Journey. I like how he retains who he needs to be, despite the corruption around him.

But do I have a whole lot to say about the story? No, not really. Charlie does uncover the Who and the Why, and is able to attain some modicum of justice. Its not the rote story that attracts me, but the competent, satisfactory play through.

One final thing that came to mind while watching. Charlie and his wife were doing quite well for themselves. A key point to the plot was that his wife bought him a run down Cessna plane, to let this puzzle and component piece obsessed man learn everything he needs to know about it, take it all apart, and put it all back together, repaired. How much does even a junker plane cost? Much more than my life time and economic bracket will ever provide. Why are so many of these movies about people in the upper end of the economic demographics? And if they don't go that way, they go the other direction, making the "hero" a rundown broken man without any money, a redneck or street thug. What about us squarely in the ever-widening middle class people who have to think about paychecks and bills and not, "Ooooo I have a plane that needs fixing!"