‘The Amateur,’ starring Rami Malek, looks the part but can’t execute the mission

Charlie (Rami Malek) doesn’t like to fly and he doesn’t like to take risks. It’s something his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan), teases him about so much, she gives him an old Cessna plane, squirreled away in a barn on their rural Virginia property, to help him to conquer his fears.

As the titular character of “The Amateur,” Charlie comes off as timid and cautious, both at home and in his professional life as a decoder at the CIA. But Charlie’s life changes in an instant when Sarah is murdered during a terrorist attack in London. Blinded by grief, he discovers the breadth of his unique skill set outside the walls of the George Bush Center for Intelligence. Fear of flying? Aversion to risk? That all goes out the window when he’s driven by vengeance.

“The Amateur,” from “Slow Horses” director James Hawes and written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli (adapting the novel by Robert Littell), presents as a globe-trotting spy thriller and begs the question: What if Jason Bourne was a nerd? Charlie isn’t saddled with amnesia; he’s stuck with his own fumbling abilities at real-world spycraft and unwillingness to shoot another human being at close range — something he’ll have to work on if he wants to achieve the justice he believes Sarah deserves.

It’s a clever premise and Malek works well in the role, with his unusually angular face and haunted eyes, constantly scanning his environments. “The Amateur” is handsomely made, its style and pace appealingly fluid, propelled by a Volker Bertelmann score. The supporting cast is full of aces, with Holt McCallany and Julianne Nicholson as CIA higher-ups, Laurence Fishburne as the man they call in to train Charlie, Jon Bernthal as a charismatic field agent and Caitríona Balfe as a mysterious international liaison. All of the elements are there, but the film is frustratingly inert.

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“The Amateur” starts off promisingly, as Charlie takes the investigation of his wife’s death into his own hands, putting his technical mastery to use in mapping out the events of that day and tracking down her killers, which takes about 30 seconds. When the CIA drags their feet on eliminating them, Charlie goes rogue. He secrets away a trove of incriminating documents about a nasty false flag operation and cover-up, which he uses as leverage to demand his own field training.

As their patience runs out on this hastily arranged bargain, Charlie manages to give the feds the slip and sets out on his own, ready or not. It’s when our man touches down in Europe that “The Amateur” starts to spin its wheels. There’s a total lack of suspense as he tracks down the mercenaries responsible for Sarah’s death and takes them out using his own creative means. Unfortunately, the trailer spoils one of the film’s most outlandish assassinations, so it unfolds with all of the energy of a joke you’ve already heard.

That’s a key part of the problem with “The Amateur,” in which it always feels like we’re ahead of the story, instead of playing catch-up and trying to figure out a mystery. There are pops of surprise, especially as Charlie demonstrates his newfound aptitude for improvised explosive devices, but there’s no mystery. He simply lays it all out for us and then things proceed as expected. There’s no thrill or shock at any of the twists or reveals: He is a vengeful, grieving husband who goes after the people he identifies as his wife’s killers, and he executes his task in a very straightforward manner. At least “John Wick” did it artfully.

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Bernthal is painfully underutilized, though he manages to make a whole meal out of his limited role. Hawes has at his disposal one of the greatest cinematic tools afforded a filmmaker — a third-act Michael Stuhlbarg monologue — but not even that can save “The Amateur.” Both actors bring a little life to the proceedings, but not enough to fully revive the corpse.

Ultimately, “The Amateur” is more of an emotional journey than a rip-roaring one, but why would we prefer the former over the latter in this context? Charlie keeps declaring that Sarah “mattered” to his superiors and to his enemies, but we only know that because he keeps insisting upon it, not because we get to know anything about her, beyond her penchant for quirky gift-giving. Why was she in London anyway?

There’s a lot missing from “The Amateur” and it’s unclear whether this happened in the inception and writing of the project or in post-production. But understanding that wouldn’t change the result. While the film’s execution seems expert on the surface, the internal narrative design is unfortunately ham-handed and woefully dull. Don’t quit your day job, Charlie.

Katie Walsh is a Tribune News Service film critic.