‘The Amateur’: The intricate CIA thriller soon to be remade
Some movies should never be remade under any circumstances, but given the storyline, it’s easy to see why an undervalued and often overlooked thriller from 1981 has been given a fresh coat of big screen paint with a star-studded cast attached.
In modern Hollywood, the rights to novels can regularly be snapped up for cinematic treatment before they’d even been published, but it’s hardly a new craze. After all, Charles Jarrott’s adaptation of Robert Littell’s The Amateur was released the very same year the author’s novel hit shelves, and he remained keenly involved after co-writing the screenplay alongside Diana Maddox.
The Deer Hunter‘s John Savage stars as CIA cryptographer Charles Heller, grieving from a terrorist attack in Munich that left his fiancée dead. When he discovers the location of the culprits, he uses bureaucracy to his advantage in an effort to guarantee he’s the person tasked to track them down.
In a very risky move, though, he uses confidential and classified information to blackmail the people above him at the agency into training him as a field agent and deploying him to Czechoslovakia to track down and exact revenge upon the culprits. Of course, this being an espionage thriller, there are plenty more twists and turns in store for a protagonist who discovers the overarching conspiracy is much larger than he could have imagined.
The Amateur was far from being a huge hit at the box office after failing to recoup its $10million budget from cinemas in the United States, and as an independent Canadian film lacking in major studio backing – even though 20th Century Fox did step in to handle international distribution – the idea of remaking it is hardly tantamount to blasphemy.
If anything, the themes of government distrust and allowing single-minded determination to reverberate around the corridors of power to suit the agenda of one person above all others is arguably more prescient now than it was back in the early ’80s, making it the perfect time for The Amateur V2.0 to stake out an April 2025 release date.
Development began as far back as 2006 with Hugh Jackman attached to play Heller, but after a decade and a half struggling to gain traction, it’s all systems go. Penny Dreadful, Black Mirror, and Slow Horses director James Hawes is helming the remake, with Academy Award winner Rami Malek starring in the lead role and executive producing.
Two-time Golden Globe winner Rachel Brosnahan and four-time Golden Globe-nominated Outlander breakout Catriona Balfe are also part of the ensemble, alongside the always-reliable trio of Laurence Fishburne, Julianne Nicholson, and Holt McCallany. The latest version of The Amateur has all the tools at its disposal to exceed the original and provide a labyrinthine political thriller with wide-reaching implications that reflects the current state of the world.
