Reputed to be in development as a reboot for Hugh Jackman for a good few years now, Robert Littell’s 1981 book forms the basis for a new Rami Malek thriller hitting our screens next week via Disney in the UK and 20th Century Studios in the UK. Those with long memories will know that it’s been filmed before; Charles Jarrott’s 1981 version of The Amateur is a tense, effective revenge thriller than makes the best of its mix of cold-blooded espionage and hot-blooded anger. A sense of righteous grievance is harnessed by a shocking opening as a terrorist gang storm the American embassy in West Germany and execute an American (Sarah Kaplan) while being filmed by live-tv crews; Jarrott’s film manages to capture the mood of a world going to hell in a handbasket.
The poster art gives an accurate enough summary of the narrative here. ‘At 29, Charles Heller was a mathematician without equal. At the CIA, he was a computer expert without peer. But when terrorists murdered the most important woman in his life, he became an assassin without experience. To avenge her death, the CIA trained him, briefed him, armed him, and then…they abandoned him. The first 11 minutes will absolutely shock you. The last 11 minutes will rivet you to your seat. The Amateur’. The set-up that follows feels modern enough. Widower Charles Heller (John Savage) is no secret agent, his speciality is mathematics and decoding messages, but when the CIA intelligence forces that he works for don’t offer any meaningful response for political reasons, Heller takes things into his own hands by infiltrating Eastern Bloc spy-networks in the hope of finding who killed his wife.
This scenario is all rather more plausible than the usual techno-thriller mechanics, Heller uses his ability to hack into the CIA files to find declassified information and force the CIA to offer him some grudging support by blackmailing them; The Amateur makes a virtue of its savvy view of dirty black ops. Filmed in Ontario, Canada with some establishing shots in Austria for an Eastern European feel, The Amateur feaytures Christopher Plummer, Marthe Keller and Arthur Hill, all names familiar to spy genre fans, and Littell’s taut screenplay ducks many of the clichés expected.
The Amateur seems to have been taken out of the DVD and streaming loop system, presumably to avoid queering the pitch for the reboot; just for fun, a DVD, if you have one, can be sold for a cool $100 a pop. The irony is that there’s no point in the last 50 years where America history where the country had less friends or influence than in 2025; the absolute amateurism of discussing military operations on media more apprpriate to planning a children’s birthday party means that the US finds itself completely out of the geo-political loop, and that stupidity seems to be deliberate. Whether the circumstances are right for a reboot that’s been anticipated for over a decade, The Amateur (1981) does a professional wet job that probably should have made more of a cultural imprint than it did.
