There is presumably a safe in Hollywood where they keep the spy/assassin/ordinary-man-taking-revenge script and it’s carved from ancient wood with names picked out in solid gold.
Bourne. Taken. John Wick. Kill Bill. Point Blank. The Equalizer. And The Amateur? It won’t be joining them.
It has a promising premise. Geeky CIA cryptographer Rami Malek’s wife is murdered in a London terrorist attack, and he goes postal.
A cute training sequence sees an excellent Laurence Fishburne despair at Malek’s feebleness but, like all this film’s good characters including Jon Bernthal’s field agent and Caitríona Balfe’s hacker, his screen time is too slight.
Malek, bless him, says all the right lines – “I want to look my wife’s killers in the eyes” – and sort of uncovers some kind of dark dealings at the agency in a vaguely unsatisfactory way.
Even the denouement is unconvincing. When his chief says “you couldn’t kill a 90-year-old nun”… well, you can buy that.
Photo credit: Disney
