The Amateur

The Amateur

The start of the “The Amateur” is so true to life that it hurts. A group of terrorists storms an American embassy, taking hostages and making demands, promising to kill one person every 15 minutes if those demands aren’t met. They pick a hostage at random a terrified young woman who asks, “What are you going to do with me?” They take her outside and shoot her.

This is tragic material; a movie about it has to be good enough for it. “The Amateur” isn’t. After hooking us with its quiet, forceful opening, the film settles into being a standard issue spy thriller one of those potboilers where the hero is kicked around by the CIA, KGB, Czech Intelligence and a beautiful woman.

John Savage plays the hero. He was very good in movies like “The Deer Hunter” and “Inside Moves,” but he’s not so good here. Maybe he’s just miscast: He’s the grief-stricken fiancé of one of the victims. He plays him as possessed by burning vengeance yet he also plays him as such a hesitating, uncertain man that there’s nobody there for us to care about.

Savage isn’t helped by the plot. I won’t tell too much about it: Just enough to indicate how routine it all is. Savage is an expert on computers for the CIA, and he breaks their security code (just like those college kids did in yesterday’s newspaper) and eavesdrops on all their secrets. Then he hides their secrets and uses them to blackmail his superiors into training him as an assassin and sending him into Czechoslovakia to hunt down his girl’s killers.

He will have some problems along these lines: The CIA plans to kill him once they find out where he hid their secrets. And the Soviets know he’s coming; they’re supposed to kill him on his way into Czechoslovakia, but they don’t, and the reason is the venerable switched-hat trick, which was old when James Fennimore Cooper used it. Also his whole technique of getting into Prague is screwy; he travels overland through an old abandoned mine tunnel that the authorities allegedly don’t know about, etc.

Never mind. This guy would be too stupid to clear customs. He walks around Prague looking like a tourist on a leash. He occasionally walks the streets with his gun drawn. He calls attention to himself at exactly the wrong times and in the wrong ways and of course he falls in love with exactly the wrong beautiful woman.

But enough of this. “The Amateur” fails because it chooses to stick by this plot and all its ridiculous details: The more deeply it gets mired in implausibility, the less we care for what’s happening onscreen. “The Day of the Jackal” was so riveting because it gave us characters who were more interesting than its plot; if you fill your thriller with people as boring as these, you’re going to have to think up something more exciting for them to do.

But John Savage must settle for mannerisms, because the script never gives him a character to play, and the other actors (Christopher Plummer, Marthe Keller, Arthur Hill) are portrayed totally by the book. When the movie gets to its sensational ending it is already too late, alas.

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