James Hawes’ 2025 spy thriller film, The Amateur, modernizes Robert Littell’s 1981 novel by the same name, but although it begins with an interesting premise and setup, it arguably loses its charm till the end. The plot here is centered around an aggrieved CIA intelligence analyst, Charlie Heller, who desperately wants the agency to deploy him for on-field action, as he wants to exact revenge against his wife’s killers. Although The Amateur is quite predictable overall, and Rami Malek’s performance is a hit-and-miss affair, it is still intriguing enough for a single watch and will be enjoyable for fans of the spy thriller genre.
Spoiler Alert
What is the film about?
The Amateur begins with Charlie Heller making some time before he has to rush to his workplace to work on an old airplane that his wife, Sarah, has recently gifted him on his birthday. It is clear that Charlie is equally passionate about private aviation and also his beloved wife, Sarah, who has to leave for London on a business trip. While she genuinely wants Charlie to accompany her for these five days, he too has professional commitments and therefore cannot make it. Once Sarah leaves for the airport, Charlie gets ready and reaches his workplace, the George Bush Center for Intelligence, in Langley, Virginia. Charlie works as an intelligence analyst for the CIA, and his current responsibility is to establish safe and secure communications with global assets.
Over the past few years, Charlie has been conversing with a foreign CIA asset over the agency’s encrypted message network, and his guess is that the individual, codenamed ‘Inquiline,’ is a middle-aged man based out of Istanbul. At present, he receives a file from Inquiline that is supposed to contain extremely sensitive information that he should be careful with, and much to Charlie’s surprise, he cannot access the files on his work laptop. His efforts to encrypt the files on a department desktop fail as well, building on to his intrigue, and Charlie realizes that the CIA system is blocking him from accessing them. It is finally when he runs the encryption in a high-security specialized room in the facility that he is able to see what the files contain, and the results truly shock him.
The files sent by Inquiline clearly show that the CIA had ordered drone strikes on American enemies during an operation in Pakistan, which had then been made to look like an attack by a suicide bomber, essentially hiding the American involvement and making the whole matter a false flag operation. Charlie finds media footage from the time of the operation, which initially claimed the matter to be a drone strike but went on to add that the US Department of Defense had denied any operation by the Air Force. Just as Charlie is reeling from the effects of this unusual discovery, he is called to the room of Director Samantha O’Brien, who informs him that Sarah has just been killed in a terrorist attack at her London hotel.
Terribly shocked and aggrieved, especially because he had not even spoken to Sarah properly in what was their last phone call, Charlie now wants revenge against the people who carried out the terrorist attack. He wants his CIA bosses to not just prepare for a full-scale retaliation against the group, but he also wants them to train him so that he too can join the operations in the field for the first time in his life, after having worked as a cryptographer for this long.
Why does Charlie dupe the CIA?
When Charlie first goes to his boss, Alex Moore, with his demand that the CIA must retaliate and take some action against the terrorists, the deputy director and a CIA supervisor, Caleb Horowitz, assure him that the agency is already investigating the matter. But when Horowitz, who has been given the responsibility of leading the investigation, seems to be intentionally slacking, and Charlie is haunted by the memories of his beloved wife after he gets hold of a puzzle she had bought for him, he decides to take matters into his own hands.
With the help of his exceptional skills as an information analyst, Charlie quickly figures out that a special team of terrorists, with operatives from all over the world, had carried out the attack after an arms deal had seemingly gone wrong. He finds out the names and nationalities of each of the terrorists and hands over this information to Moore, only to realize that he and Horowitz had already gathered this intel but had not done anything about it. When confronted by the protagonist, Horowitz claims that the CIA wants to nab the entire network, and not just the leader of the terrorist group, Horst Schiller, because of which no hasty action had been taken yet.
This is when Charlie understands that he is completely alone in his mission for vengeance and that he will not get any support from the agency, because of which he decides to go rogue against them. It had become clear to him that Alex Moore was the one who had concealed the USA’s involvement in the drone strike in Pakistan, which had killed officials from various European countries. Thus, Charlie now threatens to expose this crucial information to the world with the help of the confidential files that he had procured from Inquiline, as he pretends to have smuggled the files out of the CIA office through a series of intelligent moves.
At present, he demands to be sent to the agency’s training camp at Camp Peary in order to be taught the ways of combat and survival so that he can be fully prepared to take down the killers of his wife. Knowing that Charlie will expose his secrets otherwise, Moore does approve of this demand, and the protagonist starts training under the guidance of Robert Henderson, or Hendo. While he is away, the CIA conducts a thorough search of Charlie’s office, his home, and the bar he frequented in order to get hold of the files he had stolen. However, this search ultimately reveals that he had lied about the files, meaning that although he had found out about Moore’s covert operations, he had not smuggled the files out of the office. Charlie’s blackmail had worked simply because the allegations against Moore were true, and he now sneaks out of Camp Peary as well, before his bluff is called.
Is there a rift among the ranks of the agency?
Turns out, there is a full-fledged rift among the ranks of the CIA in The Amateur, as the film tries to throw some elements of political complications into the mix. The director of the agency, Samantha O’Brien, and the deputy director, Alex Moore, do not seem to be on the same page in a number of instances, and there is clearly a clash of ego and intentions between the two. Moore has been working as the deputy for far longer than Samantha has been the director, and it can be guessed that the man has never tried to get promoted to the role of the director because his hands would be tied in certain aspects in that case.
It is Moore who runs the black operations for the CIA, and he has been working with Horst Schiller for quite some time now. Moore basically hires Schiller to carry out various terrorist activities across the world that would benefit the USA government, but this association is obviously kept a secret from the rest of the world. It was Schiller and his team who had carried out the drone strike in Pakistan upon the orders of Moore. Although Moore, or the CIA, really did not have any involvement in Schiller’s attack in London, the deputy director categorically wants to protect Schiller because the private soldier is an important asset to him. Thus, he keeps claiming to Charlie that his wife’s killers will be caught, while in reality, he does not want Horowitz to take any action against the group.
Incidentally, Moore’s association with Schiller and the covert shadow operations that he organizes are a well-kept secret from the CIA Director, Samantha O’Brien, as well. When O’Brien finally learns about the matter and confronts Moore about the same, the latter creates political pressure on her by stating that he has the real power to get her replaced at any time. The rift between the two soon takes a very violent shape as well, once Charlie goes rogue and tracks down the terrorists across Europe. In order to protect Schiller and his team, Moore appoints Hendo to go to Spain to stop Charlie, while O’Brien sends her own representative to protect the protagonist. This representative and Hendo clash, resulting in the latter killing the former, despite being shot first.
How does Charlie track down his targets?
Charlie’s adventure across Europe is particularly interesting to watch because of how he makes use of his cryptography skills, and even though he is not an expert spy or a hardened interrogator, he does manage to make each of his targets talk. He begins with tracking down Gretchen Frank, an Armenian terrorist, in Paris and discovering that she regularly takes treatment for her allergies in a clinic. This is where Charlie corners Gretchen by filling the altitude chamber she is inside of with pollen, forcing her to admit that Schiller’s men usually reach out to her via messages. Although Charlie cannot bring himself to kill the woman, she does die soon after running into heavy traffic and being hit by a van. He gets hold of her phone in this manner and goes after his second target, Mishka Blazhic.
A Belarusian national, Blazhic has the flashiest lifestyle among all the terrorists, as he cannot stop flaunting on social media, and it is through one of his posts that Charlie tracks him down to Madrid. The protagonist kills Blazhic in a rather unique fashion, by blasting the glass of the swimming pool on a hotel rooftop, which means that the terrorist falls to his death from the extreme height. The South African ex-special forces officer, Ellish, is up next, and Charlie makes use of his skills with explosives in order to take the man down. He basically traps Ellish into revealing the location of Horst Schiller before the man is blown to bits by a uniquely crafted explosive.
During his adventure across the continent, Charlie also realizes the true identity of the CIA asset codenamed Inquiline, who turns out to be very different than what he had imagined. Inquiline, or Davies, is actually a middle-aged woman who has stepped into the role of a CIA asset, which originally belonged to her husband, an ex-KGB officer. When the man’s links to the CIA were found, he was immediately killed by the KGB, and Davies then took over his work out of sheer hatred against the Russians. Unfortunately for her, Davies’ decision to help Charlie in his personal mission gets her killed by the FSB, who are roped into the matter by Horowitz, as he desperately wants to stop Charlie and anyone who is helping him.
Who does Charlie run into at the Russian dock?
Charlie is led to the Russian dock town of Primorsk by Ellish, and he reaches the place in his attempt to track down and kill Horst Schiller. But before he can reach his nemesis, Charlie runs into a CIA operative named Jackson O’Brien, who is usually known by this codename, Bear. Charlie and Bear had been seen chatting at the CIA office at the beginning of the film, and it was revealed at the time that Bear has a special affinity towards Charlie despite himself being a star agent while the latter is merely an analyst. The reason for this affinity is revealed to be Charlie’s brave role in saving Bear’s life in an earlier mission, but we do not learn anything more about this mission. Thus, when Bear finds Charlie at Primorsk towards the end of the film, he does not report the rogue agent to the agency, as all agents have now been told to do, but instead lets the protagonist go his merry way. Apart from showing how the protagonist has some very loyal friends in important positions, this scene probably wants to set us up for a sequel, or rather a prequel film, in which we will see the origins of Charlie and Bear’s friendship.
Did Charlie finally get his revenge?
During The Amateur’s ending, Charlie is finally able to reach Schiller’s boat and confront him, although the villainous terrorist does not deny any of his allegations. In a rather bizarre and unsatisfying twist, Schiller tries to take the psychological route in order to protect himself, and so he pretends to surrender in front of Charlie and hands him a gun to end his life. The idea behind this scene is that no matter how ruthless Charlie has been over the past few days, he is not so cruel and morally corrupt that he will kill the man responsible for killing his wife from point-blank range. As expected, Charlie does not kill Horst Schiller but hacks his boat instead and makes it enter Finnish territory, where Interpol is already waiting to capture the terrorist. Thus, in the end, Charlie does get his revenge, but by having his wife’s killer arrested with the help of Interpol.
Is Charlie still a CIA agent?
Considering the extent to which Charlie Heller had broken the rules of the CIA in the past few days or weeks, it seems almost unlikely that he will be accepted back into the agency. In fact, it seems more plausible that he will continue to be hunted by the CIA, as the American intelligence will prefer to keep all its mistakes a secret from the world. However, there is one last twist in The Amateur in this regard, as CIA Director Samantha O’Brien decides to come clean about the agency’s shadow operations and unlawful tactics, mostly because doing so benefits her position and pins all the blame on the Deputy Director. Thus, Alex Moore is arrested by the CIA for having conducted the illegal operations on foreign soil, and O’Brien also announces in the media conference that Charlie Heller will continue to work for the agency. This is surely one last attempt by The Amateur to ensure that a sequel is possible, and Rami Malek might return as the flawed but effective spy sometime in the future.
