The Amateur opens with Charles Heller (Rami Malek) laying out a tarp in his garage, littering with what we would perceive as a box of scraps. But to him, these trinkets are all pieces to a puzzle, a broken plane just begging to be repaired. It was bought by his wife Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) as a birthday present, the couple living in a cozy farmhouse just outside of Washington DC. Charlie’s high IQ and knack for challenges make him the perfect decrypter for the CIA, buried five floors deep and into the muck of US foreign policy. He’s also the nerdy sort, the kind that sits at the lunch table with the rest of the brainiacs solving brain teasers while gawking over at the field agents who go out and get their hands dirty.

Those seeking adventure often find themselves in it, but never in the way they’d expect. For Charlie, that curl of the monkey’s paw comes when Sarah is killed in the midst of a botched terrorist hostage situation during her conference in London. The bosses at the CIA put the “greater good” over vengeance for Sarah, opting to let the terrorists walk for now in hopes that they’ll stir up the rest of the criminal nest. But Charlie can’t take the high road on this one, taking matters into his own hands through some convenient blackmail that unlocks an arsenal that would make Batman shiver.

Having already been unmemorably adapted for the screen back in 1981, Robert Littell’s novel is probably a great read on an airplane. Director James Hawes, riding pretty high after directing the entire first season of Slow Horses and the underrated Anthony Hopkins-starring drama One Life, maintains an engaging level of intrigue throughout his production. There’s a crispness to the proceedings as Charles hunts down the four responsible men one by one, taking him across various metropolitan areas within Europe.

While the story of a man calculatingly seeking revenge on the men who harmed his significant other closely mirrors that of 2023’s The Killer, Hawes is nowhere near the level of David Fincher. The satisfaction of a completed cycle never reaches the point it needs to, largely due to the silliness of the mini-climaxes. This is a ludicrous premise, but an interrogation through the threat of pollen and the pressurized destruction of a glass swimming pool takes things down a distractingly skeptical road. Even more ludicrous, albeit amusingly, is the concept of the CIA publicly admitting to wrongdoings on foreign soil. Based on all the headlines over the past few weeks (or months… or years), I chuckled as Julianne Nicholson stood up at the podium as the CIA director and preached American values such as accountability and honor.

Hawes and his screenwriting duo, Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, never waver on the emotional core of this story. After Sarah’s death, the return of her suitcase and the routineness of Charlie’s last conversation with her take on a whole new meaning. I mentioned that it was ludicrous for all this to happen, but there’s never a moment where I doubt why Charlie would convince himself that he needs to do it. It might be because this is just a lateral movement from Mr. Robot, but Malek’s casting is top-notch. He doesn’t have the presence to be a traditional leading man, but a movie like this that relies less on bullets and machismo works in his favor.

James Bond and Jason Bourne are both in a corporate-induced hibernation for the moment, so a lower-staked espionage action thriller such as this flies pretty high at the moment. Along with Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag, it’s a nice appetizer before Ethan Hunt makes everything go boom in a few weeks.