The Amateur – Review

Likely neurodivergent CIA analyst Charlie Heller (Malek) lives with his wifey Sarah (Brosnahan), living the good life of spy data reconciliation. His wife heads off for a few days to London for a business trip, and he promises to water the plants. She will try to find a way to live without his exquisite coffee for a short bit.

Charlie heads to work and beings his week as usual, looking through data troves and briefly helping field agent Jackson O’Brien (Bernthal) who is stateside for a few days and needs his tech hardware looked at. Additionally, that day, he receives a dangerous and classified file dump from a 5-year anonymous source.

While none of this is too out of the ordinary for the introverted analyst, unfortunately for Charlie that’s not the end of the day and a terror attack in London rocks his world. As a mysterious event strikes, Charlie finds his analyst brain working overtime on the recent events. He feels a new anger, and confusion towards the world and the agency he works for. His directors Alex Moore (McCallany) Caleb Horowitz (Sapani) and Samantha O’Brien (Nicholson) dismiss his findings and suggest therapy. They have their plans to take down the whole terrorist cell.

As Charlie dives into his own agency’s workings and data surrounding recent terrorist attacks he gets caught up in a storm of political decisions and dark CIA operations. Then, he makes his plan, and decides to try and force his bosses into agreeing with it.

There are a few nice twists and turns in The Agency, itself a nice spy action thriller. It is based on an early 80s novel, but using modern tech the story works just fine still. There is a lot more good here than bad, and the interesting core story has some good moments.