The Amateur (Movie)

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    Watch Rami Malek Explode a Pool in ‘The Amateur’

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    The director James Hawes narrates a sequence from his film.In “Anatomy of a Scene,” we ask directors to reveal the secrets that go into making key scenes in their movies. See new episodes in the series on Fridays. You can also watch our collection of more than 150 videos on YouTube and subscribe to our YouTube channel.A glass-bottom pool that straddles two buildings can make for quite a luxurious swim, as long as nobody tries to blow it up.The fate of one high-rise swimmer doesn’t look good in this scene from the spy thriller “The Amateur,” in which Rami Malek plays Charlie Heller, a C.I.A. cryptographer out to avenge his wife’s death. But more than guns and fists, he’s using intelligence and craftiness to get the job done.Here, Charlie encounters one of his targets, Mishka Blazhic (Marc Rissmann), who has been given solo access to a hotel pool for a night swim. Interrogating Mishka, Charlie informs him that he is holding the remote control to a device that is decompressing the air between the sheets of glass at the base of the pool. If he triggers the device, the glass will shatter.Narrating the sequence, the director James Hawes said that there were few locations in the world with pools that sit between two buildings.“We were lucky enough to find a location in London that gave us that,” he said, “but they weren’t going to let us blow it up.”Hawes said that he and his crew used it to shoot a portion of the scene, but then they built a life-size section of the pool in a studio, which allowed them to fill the pool with water and explode it. They even rigged up a stunt person to be sucked back as the bottom gave way.“So a lot of the work is done in camera,” he said, “and only then does VFX start to take over.”Read the “Amateur” review.Sign up for the Movies Update newsletter and get a roundup of reviews, news, Critics’ Picks and more. More

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      Rami Malek, Professional Outcast, Becomes ‘The Amateur’

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      The first time the world got a good look at Rami Malek, computer screens were reflected more often than not in his distinctive peepers. As the star of “Mr. Robot,” Sam Esmail’s zeitgeisty TV series about a psychologically damaged hacker’s fight against the billionaire class, Malek seemed a creature of zeros and ones, shrinking into the omnipresent black hoodie of the show’s protagonist, Elliot Alderson, even as his actions as a keyboard warrior shook the globe.But in his most famous role to date, Malek rocked the world in a very different way. He earned an Oscar for his performance as the Queen frontman Freddie Mercury in the blockbuster rock-star biopic “Bohemian Rhapsody.” But underneath the glitz, the glamour and the mustache, Freddie was much like Elliot: an underestimated outsider who thrust himself into the spotlight through sheer force of will.“I know I’m a very unique individual,” Malek said. “My mannerisms are unique. My speech is unique. There’s a certain flicker behind my eyes that you can’t necessarily compare to anyone else — that’s what I’ve been told, at least. The camera has an ability to capture every essence of that.”Thea Traff for The New York TimesAt first glance, Malek’s new film, “The Amateur,” feels like a return to the world of digital skulduggery he inhabited in “Mr. Robot.” In this action thriller adapted from Robert Littell’s novel and directed by James Hawes, Malek stars as Charlie Heller, a C.I.A. cryptographer who takes matters into his own hands when his compromised superiors refuse to arrest the mercenaries who murdered his wife. Lacking the killer instinct to get up close and personal with his targets, he instead uses his intellectual know-how to devise a series of elaborate booby traps that take them down one by one.But Malek sees a through line that connects all three characters: They’re outsiders who prove their doubters, including themselves, wrong. “It may be an action movie, but one of the themes is personal transformation,” Malek said. “Sometimes we go to the cinema to see someone race to a telephone booth and don a cape in order to do so. Freddie put on his own cloak onstage. Elliot famously had a hoodie. I’ve had moments of personal transformation throughout my life — we all have. For Charlie, it’s a willingness to take matters into his own hands.”In a video call from New York, Malek talked about putting his own inimitable spin on the action hero. The following are edited excerpts from that conversation.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘The Amateur’ Review: An Unsafe World

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      Rami Malek stars in a spy movie that struggles with its conspiratorial angle.For about 20 minutes, “The Amateur” is pretty exciting: It’s glossy, it’s beautifully cast, and it boasts an intriguing premise. Charlie Heller (Rami Malek), a C.I.A. cryptographer — the movie informs us right off the bat that he has a “big brain” — bids his beloved wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), goodbye as she’s off to London for business. Arriving at work, he receives a batch of highly secretive encoded files from a long-running anonymous source, and when he cracks them open he realizes they reveal a series of rogue operations all over the world, ordered by some high-ranking official at the agency, that resulted in civilian deaths. And then, he receives word that Sarah has been killed in an attack at her hotel in London.Solid setup. But though Charlie commences globe-trotting in search of revenge, the movie somehow feels like it’s treading water, going nowhere at all. He concocts an elaborate plot to force the misbehaving C.I.A. bosses into giving him some training in various agent-like activities (shooting, fighting, making improvised explosive devices), which they do, under the tutelage of the gruff Robert Henderson (Laurence Fishburne). Then, before the bosses catch onto his true plan, he takes off with agents on his tail. It’s a classic case of This Guy Knows Too Much and Must Be Eliminated.“The Amateur” — based on Robert Littell’s 1981 novel, also adapted for a 1982 film — is shaped like a jet-setting vigilante spy flick, served alongside a heaping dose of conspiracy thriller. Those genres tend to overlap well, given their penchant for overly complicated plots, futuristic tech gadgets and a deep sense of paranoia. This one has some of the other hallmarks, too — the dead wife, the mysterious informant, the chases through foreign streets. Working with the cinematographer Martin Ruhe, the director James Hawes serves up the kind of images that seem full of meaning and menace, which is what you want from this kind of movie. Malek underplays Charlie — not the kind of guy you normally find at the center of a spy movie — which means his moments of true emotion feel suitably poignant. And Jon Bernthal, Catriona Balfe, Holt McCallany, Julianne Nicholson and Michael Stuhlbarg round out an excellent cast.But there is, to put it colloquially, just no there there. I get that “The Amateur” isn’t interested in Bond-style comedy, opting instead for dramatic beats befitting a bereaved husband and the limits of revenge, I think. But this screenplay (written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli) promises a lot from the start, and then delivers little to back it up. After a while, the narrow escapes and Charlie’s occasional tech-aided gotchas become repetitive. It felt a bit like the life was draining away from the movie the longer it went on — as if this was more of an imitation of a good movie than an actually good movie. (The technical name for this among critics is a “nothingburger.”)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More