REVIEW:
The Amateur wasn’t really good, but wasn’t really bad either. It’s a movie that very much feels like we’ve seen it before. Again and again. A movie about a guy whose wife is killed and now goes on a vengeance tour seeking to get back at her killers. From Death Wish to the Crow to Taken to Kill Bill, this genre has been done to death. The only difference here is that this guy is a CIA analyst, meaning he’s not a killer, and is more of a pencil pusher who did behind a desk.
Now that is different. But it’s not exactly good different. We like watching the guy who can kick ass, not the wimp. Luckily, our protagonist here does have a few tricks up his sleeve. He uses Saw-style tricks and traps to get back at these killers. Some of the traps are cool (a glass booth filled with pollen, a rooftop swimming pool that caves in on itself,) others are not. But even the cool ones are just a few moments in an otherwise kind of dull film. The action is fine, but there’s just not enough if it. And these stars, Rami Malik and Lawrence Fishbourne, don’t exactly have that it factor that make you want to follow them, (like for example, Sam Rockwell does.) With a very anti-climactic ending on a ship, this nine is pretty much a waste.