REVIEW: Rami Malek steps out in techno spy thriller ‘The Amateur’

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It’s tempting to guffaw at the glut of “men at work” action films in theatres this month (see: the hard-hat-hitting Jason Statham yarn “A Working Man” and the upcoming Ben Affleck sequel “The Accountant 2”), but studio executives might be on to something. What better time to escape into watching someone’s boring old day job become a thrilling adventure than tax-filing season?

The latest is “The Amateur,” starring Oscar winner Rami Malek (2018’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”) as introverted CIA data cruncher Charlie Heller, out for justice after his wife is killed in a terrorist attack. Solidly entertaining but a tad too serious, this one’s more sobering than the cheekier action heroes having a ball blasting away bad guys on other screens. Unlike his peers in a subgenre lately filled with brawny beekeepers, construction workers and autistic CPAs, Malek’s nerd out of water is woefully unprepared for the 007 life and exceptionally bad with guns. He does, however, have a particular set of skills.

Charlie enjoys a quiet domestic life in a renovated Virginia farmhouse with his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), and a career deciphering satellite images and intel in the windowless bowels of Langley. Awkward around people but adept at puzzles, he’s a cyber Sherlock Holmes, which comes in rather handy when Sarah dies during a hostage crisis while in London for a work conference.

Haunted by surveillance footage of his wife’s final moments, Charlie uses his geek squad talents to ID those responsible, only to learn that his higher-ups (Holt McCallany and Danny Sapani) are looking the other way to hide their own covert agendas from a new CIA director (Julianne Nicholson). What’s a justice-seeking desk jockey to do? Charlie blackmails his bosses into getting him professional killer training so he can hunt down Sarah’s killers himself, naturally.

Striving for the globe-trotting grittiness of the Bourne series and the everyman intrigue of “Three Days of the Condor,” this classically assembled thriller, directed by James Hawes (“Slow Horses,” “Snowpiercer”) and adapted by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli from Robert Littell’s 1981 spy novel of the same name, revs up as Charlie goes rogue, proving more capable than he seems. After a crash course in spycraft from skeptical field trainer Henderson (a cool, commanding Laurence Fishburne), he slips off to Paris, Marseille, Madrid and Istanbul, using his smarts and a knack for finding good WiFi anywhere on Earth to track down his targets and stay one step ahead of the CIA overlords looking to shut him down.

Memorable interactions mark his unlikely hero’s journey, with standout supporting turns by Jon Bernthal as a wily CIA co-worker, a magnetic Caitríona Balfe as the exiled Russian asset Charlie turns to for help and Michael Stuhlbarg as the pensive terrorist mastermind who represents his ultimate test. Crisp photography by Martin Ruhe pays keen attention to color and texture, from the shadows of CIA HQ to neon-soaked French nightclubs and the expansive Turkish coastline. Composer Volker Bertelmann’s mournful orchestrations and pulse-pounding drumbeats accompany Charlie’s bumbling foot chases and bruising fights.

Yet, for an emotionally driven meditation on grief and the moral costs of retribution, “The Amateur” struggles to square Malek’s rigid mannerisms with his character’s anguish. And behind the camera, Hawes keeps us at an alienating distance, relying on unsubtle exposition to explain Charlie’s tech-enabled traps, and weepy visions of his dead wife to illuminate his inner turmoil.

It’s all so serious, you wish it would embrace more of the humor that surfaces in fleeting moments both visually spectacular (a suspended swimming pool shatters, 16 stories high) and very silly (death by pollen overdose? Now there’s a new one). It also doesn’t help that decades of spy movies have trained us to clock double crosses and “Mission: Impossible”-style switcheroos at every turn, so “The Amateur” falls victim to its own leaky plotting, which suggests more complex twists than it actually has up its sleeves.

Still, it’s diverting enough to watch Malek mathematically MacGyver his way through villains using brain muscle alone. “The Amateur” may be off to a rocky start as a spy franchise, but it scores one for the IT crowd.

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Two and one-half stars. Rated PG-13. At theatres. Contains strong violence and language. 123 minutes.

Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars OK, one star poor, no stars waste of time.