The Amateur trailer begins with Rami Malek’s character, Charles Heller, a cryptographer working for the CIA, living a happy and indifferent life with his wife, played by Rachel Brosnahan. In the first few seconds of the trailer, he seems like a regular corporate employee who sends cryptic information to the CIA without indulging in its details.
“You ever wonder what they do with all the stuff you dig up for them? You never wonder?” Brosnahan asks Malek in the trailer. “That’s not my job. It’s the CIA I gotta trust that they’ll make the right call. Maybe it’s better not to know,” the latter replies. After a farewell moment between the couple, the scene cuts to Malek finding out about his wife’s murder through a news channel. That’s when things start to go south!
Devastated by his wife’s death, Heller, who’s always been a computer geek, decided to go after a terrorist group to avenge her death, hence the title. Despite the CIA trying to convince him to let them handle the case, he demands to be involved and requests “mission-specific training, cash, and a new identity.”
The amateur learns how to shoot and kill but seems to fail miserably. “You can’t do what I do no matter how much I train you. You’re just not a killer, Charlie,” the trainer, played by Laurence Fishburne, tells the protagonist. However, Malek’s character uses his geekiness to develop cunning techniques to get back at her wife’s murderers.
The film by Slow Horses director James Hawes is based on the 1981 novel by Robert Littell. It follows a “CIA cryptographer, who manages to blackmail his agency into training him to let him go after a group of terrorists who killed his wife in London,” as per the official synopsis.
This is Malek’s second action thriller after the 2021 film The Little Things. He starred in the Daniel Craig adventure action film No Time to Die that same year. He also made a memorable appearance in the Oscar-winning film Oppenheimer in 2023.
The Amateur will hit the theaters on April 11, 2025.
