The Amateur | Satirical Film Review | Part 1

HECKLED By Jokes

The Amateur is a 2025 film directed by James Hawes. Yes, I've never heard of him either.

The film was mostly made in the United Kingdom. I guess production costs are much cheaper in a third world country, so of course, It's got the obligatory Trip Advisor shots of Big Ben and Tower Bridge. You know for that ninety eight percent of the American audience that are unable to travel because they don't have a passport or can't fit in an airplane seat.

And it’s starring Rami Malik and Rami is one of those actors who looks like an alien wearing a human costume that doesn't quite fit. I guess other examples are Willem Defoe, Nicholas Cage and even Margot Robbie, it’s those eyes of hers.

He plays a CIA data analyst. Yeah, he does valuable computer stuff, like reading our text messages or sending girl guides to politicians' hotel rooms. You know, the usual kind of stuff the CIA does.

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And like all data analysts he’s got a beautiful, sexy, loving wife because as we all know nothing turns a woman on more than a man who analyses data. In fact, just recently, in my efforts to entice a Victoria's Secret model, I've started learning JavaScript.

Well for some reason, his sexy, loving wife decides to visit London and then she gets killed by some terrorists. Which is pretty unlucky, actually. The chances of being killed by terrorists when you visit London is only one in three.

What is lucky, though, is that all the terrorists are Caucasian so we all get to relax for the rest of the film and I don’t have to use annoying words like problematic.

Now Rami is pretty down in the dumps about this so he finds out who the terrorists are and he asks his CIA bosses to kill them but they say they are too busy overthrowing democratically elected governments.

Then he threatens his bosses saying that if you don’t help me I will leak information to top journalists about all the bad things the CIA has done and you’ll be in big trouble because you’re really scared of the media, aren’t you? The CIA bosses then spend the next ten minutes laughing in his face and showing him photographs of those same top journalists having sexual relations with farmyard animals.

So like a lot of people who’ve had any interaction with the civil service, he says bollocks, I’ve got some free weekends coming up, I’ll just hunt down the terrorists myself.

And that’s the basic premise of the film, Young Sheldon does the Bourne Identity. Or Revenge of The Nerds meets Mission Impossible or Dumb and Dumber and Deuce Bigalow Spend A Weekend At Bernie’s With The Mossad. MI5 and Napoleon Dynamite At Zero Dark Thirty. You know, that kind of thing.

He first goes to London to St. Pancras station where his wife was killed. And I know St Pancras very well. It's one of my favourite places in all of London to wait for a delayed train. It’s one of the great pleasures of British life, spending hours hopefully waiting on public transportation that will never come. You can even get quite a lot of work done, in between the periodical machete attacks.

But then he leaves London and goes to Paris, where although the customer service is equally as horrendous, the food, unlike in London, is actually fit for human consumption.

In Paris he tracks down the first assassin who is a middle aged lady. I'm not sure how a middle aged lady ended up as an assassin. Although I guess being a killer for hire it's not too much of a leap from working in HR.

He then commits the least impressive murder attempt in cinematic history. She goes in a hypobaric chamber for allergies and he locks her in it and puts a bunch of pollen he happens to have on him. That's right, he's trying to commit death by hay fever. I'm not making this up. She escapes, runs into the street and gets knocked down and killed by a van. Carrying a load of antihistamine. I made that last bit up.

So he's caused the death of the first assassin. I'm not sure how he plans to kill the others. Perhaps through other common ailments. Maybe attack one through his athletes foot. Antifungal powder laced with anthrax. An improvised explosive device in Dandruff shampoo.

We’ll find out in part 2. See you then!