“Someone to Die For”

Most films that portray grief manage to create an emotional heaviness in the viewer by the final credits. In the opening scenes of THE AMATEUR (2025), Rami Malek made me not only believe but also share his character’s terrible loss. I teared up. The only other movie character that broke my cool façade into quivering empathy as quickly was Greyfriars Bobby—a depiction of a Skye Terrier that allegedly slept on his master’s grave in Edinburgh through all seasons for 14 years.

As impressed as I was by Malek’s skill to quickly communicate what felt like honest human emotion, I was also delighted with the movie’s premise. Malek plays well-mannered Charlie Heller, a brilliant CIA decoder who yearns to bring his wife’s four murderers to justice since no one else is willing to prioritize the task. Laurence Fishburne, the experienced operative Charlie forces his superiors to assign to train him to kill, tells Charlie he has almost zero chance of surviving, much less succeeding. He’s not a killer. He can’t look an opponent in the eyes and pull a trigger. His aim is as poor as his eyesight, and he can readily be beaten in a fight. Charlie submits that the trainer is focusing on his weaknesses and ignoring his strengths—which include limitless strategy, inside familiarity with covert actions, and an extreme command of technology. In other words, brute strength and firepower are not the heroes of the moment. Malek doesn’t need to fake six-pack abs or height. Charlie concocts unique ways to eliminate the killers. As a fresh take on education might demonstrate, Charlie shows us success is most efficient when the process begins by identifying the subject’s strengths and works with them, allowing severe weaknesses to be irrelevant.

While our present government is willing to denigrate and ignore the talents and skills of minorities they don’t personally appreciate or understand, this movie reminds us how easy misjudging a person’s value can be. Complete dependence on size and muscle is nearly obsolete, to be replaced by complex weapons that can execute demands with minimum direction. Traditional representations of heroes such as the ones used in film are often stuck on physical attributes. (As Alan Rickman chides Tim Allen in GALAXY QUEST, “I see you managed to get your shirt off!”) But what if the problems threatening our society aren’t simple? What if the answers aren’t obviously physical? Intelligence looks for original solutions to dilemmas that appear impossible to mitigate with expertise—problems like hurricanes, droughts, floods, and wildfires. Creativity doesn’t always require genius, but it helps.

Critics complain that THE AMATEUR uses conflicts we’ve come to expect in spy movies. Perhaps we expect them, because we’ve been indoctrinated to do so by repetition. A thorough examination of authentic spies of wars or other conflicts past, now nearly forgotten, reveals a number of unlikely persons. A few outstanding wartime heroes who probably wouldn’t be lauded by our leaders today include the black singer/dancer/spy Josephine Baker, sexy actress/inventor Rita Hayworth, and Alan Turing, who cracked the code of the Nazi’s lethal communication machine to become the father of theoretical computer science before he was incarcerated for being homosexual. Perhaps the most effective operatives were and are people we might never cast as heroes. Perhaps what they have in common is an ability to use their raw intelligence to dare as far as death for a cause that a character in PROJECT HAIL MARY calls “someone to die for.”