Before Jack Ryan was introduced into the culture, Robert Littell imagined Charlie Heller, a quiet, CIA cryptographer who goes rogue on a quest for vengeance after his love is killed by terrorists.
As star of The Amateur, currently in Taiwan theaters, Rami Malek gets to be both skittish nerd and coolly competent angel of death. He’s the homebody and perpetual rule-follower who in grief-stricken madness decides to blackmail his bosses and go on an international killing spree to get the people responsible for her death.
The story is based on a book published in 1981 — a product of its Cold War context that was even made into a movie starring John Savage. But even with the Iron Curtain and the Holocaust in its DNA, it also has the kind of foundation that’s essentially evergreen in Hollywood. There’s tragedy, drama, cinematic globetrotting and a fish-out-of-water story that’s a little more relatable than watching some preternaturally talented superspy (at least in theory).
Photo: AP
In this newest take, credited to screenwriters Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli and directed by James Hawes, the story has been updated for the modern age, with decidedly murky international politics and sophisticated facial and voice recognition software that can identify masked terrorists and their networks and find rogue agents in an instant.
The locations are many: London, Paris, Marseille, Istanbul included. The cast is stacked: Laurence Fishburne is a veteran assassin who agrees to train Charlie, Rachel Brosnahan is the dead wife, Julianne Nicholson is the CIA director, Holt McCallany is Charlie’s shady boss. Jon Bernthal, Caitriona Balfe and Michael Stuhlbarg also play pivotal roles. And anyone who has seen the trailer has already gotten a preview of the most impressive set piece, involving a glass infinity pool.
The Amateur has a lot going for it — but it takes also takes a while to get going. Once it does, it can’t quite maintain a level of energy and suspense needed to justify its runtime. This might be because the film is attempting to be something that’s equal parts action-packed and meditative, but for us that means listening to several conversations about the nature of killing that start to sound quite repetitive.
Photo: AP
There’s this throughline that Charlie is not a born killer. While a court of law might disagree, everyone in this film seems to think that there’s something different between shooting someone point blank and, say, setting up an elaborate trap that you know will result in a death. Still, it seems like that is a debate that could end after he does intentionally kill someone and goes looking for more.
It’s interesting what a film like this chooses to focus on and what it disregards. At the beginning, Charlie declines his wife’s invitation to accompany her to London, where she will of course die. He regrets this deeply, but we’re also told that he always declines: He doesn’t travel internationally almost as a rule. Why? Unclear, but you’d think perhaps this might factor into the plot somehow as he begins his globetrotting.
Instead, it’s not an issue at all: He capably navigates all manner of transport across Europe, from cargo flights to busses full of migrants. There are other underdeveloped curiosities, like Jon Bernthal as a cool guy superspy with basically two scenes that don’t seem to advance the story at all. And don’t get me started on poor Brosnahan as the dead wife who we’re constantly being told “mattered” but who we know so little about. Sarah is often seen in flashback in flowy floral dresses doting on her quirky husband in their idyllic Virginia farmhouse. To the film’s credit, they don’t show her laughing under white sheets.
Photo: AP
But perhaps this is asking too much of a big screen spy spectacle in which Malek is compelling as an unlikely vigilante — even if we might not totally understand why he’s decided this is the only way. He doesn’t exactly sell it the way Harrison Ford was able to in Patriot Games, though that’s an unfair bar.
With James Bond in a reset mode and Ethan Hunt promising final reckonings, most of the good globetrotting spy thrillers seem to have migrated to the small screen lately. Something about the episodic nature of it suits the genre, whether it’s Slow Horses, Black Doves or even Jack Ryan. But, as with Black Bag from earlier this year, it’s always welcome when we get an offering on the big screen: They just look better there.
Photo: AP
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ!). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
At Computex 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) urged the government to subsidize AI. “All schools in Taiwan must integrate AI into their curricula,” he declared. A few months earlier, he said, “If I were a student today, I’d immediately start using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini Pro and Grok to learn, write and accelerate my thinking.” Huang sees the AI-bullet train leaving the station. And as one of its drivers, he’s worried about youth not getting on board — bad for their careers, and bad for his workforce. As a semiconductor supply-chain powerhouse and AI hub wannabe, Taiwan is seeing