Review: 'The Amateur' follows Rami Malek as a CIA codebreaker on a revenge spree that's intricate and oddly distant

The spy thriller “The Amateur” takes the old saying “revenge is a dish best served cold” to extremes — as its coldness keeps us from getting to know or feel for star Rami Malek’s vengeance-seeking character.

Malek plays Charlie Heller, a super-nerdy computer expert who works in the deepest depths of the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. He’s happily married to Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), and gives her warm hugs and kisses as she heads off to a business trip to London. The movie establishes early that Charlie doesn’t like to travel, more content with puttering with an old Cessna he’s trying to rebuild in the barn behind their house.

We follow Charlie into CIA headquarters, which has the same dynamic as high school. Charlie, whose expertise is encryption and computer hackery, sits with the nerds in the CIA cafeteria. The jocks are the field agents, like one called The Bear, played by Jon Bernthal, who is pals with Charlie. Consider this Chekhov’s Jon Bernthal — if we see Bernthal in the first act, it’s a good bet he’ll come into play in the third act.

One day, Charlie gets called in to see the deputy director, Moore (Holt McCallany), and Director O’Brien (Julianne Nicholson), with horrific news: There’s been a terrorist attack in a London hotel, in which Sarah was taken hostage and then killed.

Charlie uses his computer and surveillance skills to figure out who plotted the attack, and is angry when Moore sits on the information. So he demands from Moore that he be trained to go into the field, to find and kill those who killed his wife. Moore and his aide, Caleb (Danny Sapani), laugh off the request — but then Charlie backs it up with a bit of blackmail, using some intel about some of Moore’s off-the-books operations. Moore decides to play along, figuring that Charlie will either give up or get himself killed.

Moore assigns a hard-as-nails trainer, Col. Henderson (Laurence Fishburne), to show Charlie how difficult being a killer can be — determining that Charlie doesn’t have the instinct to pull the trigger when necessary. When Charlie slips Henderson’s custody and heads to Paris to pursue the terrorists, Moore puts Henderson on his trail. But Charlie proves to be cagier than anticipated, telling Henderson during one encounter, “Do you ever account for the things I’m good at?”

Director James Hawes — whose career mostly has been in TV, most recently on the first season of “Slow Horses” — and screenwriters Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli adapt Robert Littell’s novel into essentially a geek version of a Jason Bourne movie. Charlie’s route goes through several intriguing locations, from Paris to Istanbul to Romania, where he creatively dispatches the killers, one with a bag of pollen, another in a rooftop swimming pool.

Unfortunately, because Hawes presents the action in such a cool, calculating way, and because Malek so internalizes his character’s emotional state, we’re never let in on Charlie’s emotions as he carries out his mission. Even the big confrontation with the terrorist ringleader (Michael Stuhlbarg) comes off as remote, a damp ending to what could have been a firecracker of a thriller.

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‘The Amateur’

★★1/2

Opens Friday, April 11, in theaters everywhere. Rated PG-13 for some strong violence, and language. Running time: 123 minutes.