The Amateur 2025 Movie Review: Mr. Robot Mails It In

Rami Malek is one of my all-time favorite actors for the same reason SNL pulls his leg every so often - his intensity. That's what makes his content fun to watch. That's how I went into watch the movie, with sizeable expectations, and they were not met to the extent that I thought they would be. This is an okay film at best.

TMJ Rating: 🍿🍿🍿/ 5

The Plot of The Amateur 2025 Movie

There is nothing new in the plot that we haven't already seen. An "everyman" is pushed to the extreme when someone he loves is taken away from him in a violent manner. One such movie was American Assassin starring Dylan O'Brien of Love and Monsters ( 2020 ) fame and Yousef Sweid, who acts in the Woman of the Dead series ( two of my favorite actors ).

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But that movie also had Michael Keaton ( freakin Batman! ) with movies like Knox Goes Away still keeping him relevant outside of superhero movies. Also, O'Brien has such badass lines that alone make the movie worth watching - "I want them to know I am coming," referring to the people who killed his fiancée in cold blood. He goes on to train in various martial arts and combat training so that when the time comes, he can take down his targets.

But Rami Malek has his own kind of badassery as a person who speaks in binary code and can wreak havoc with just a laptop and a secure net connection, as seen in Mr. Robot.  But he has been reduced to a semi-lethal hacker who gets even with the attackers who killed his wife in The Amateur 2025 Movie.

In a variation of the sequence shown in Mechanic: Resurrection ( Jason Statham ), Malek does it cleaner, smoother, and with a lot more style when he destroys a pool constructed between two buildings using a fancy tech technique.

In another sequence, Malek rigs up something to blow his target into pieces while walking away unscathed and satisfied with a job well done.

You get a cameo from Jon Bernthal, which is always fun to watch, considering it feels like he is just being himself and also playing the role as required at the same time - the complete opposite of Daniel Day Lewis where he disappears into the role, takes on their persona and doesn't emerge until it is tme for another movie.

The cinematography is pretty good, the action is standard, but the execution could have been a whole lot better. I mean, they could have used a lot more tech, amped up the creativity in the way that Malek used to deploy said tech to make it more entertaining. In all respects, this movie is a standard action flick that underperforms given its lead and premise.

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There is nothing special about the cast, considering that Lawrence Fishburne has minimal screentime, Caitriona Balfe doesn't have much to do, except helping out Malek marginally, and everyone else, including Rachel Brosnahan, just fade into the background, just like the execution of this movie, which deserves a lot better.

Should You Watch It? On OTT, with low Expectations

If you are facing some downtime and need some mid-level entertainment, then The Amateur is for you; otherwise, you aren't missing anything spectacular or amazing.