CIA cryptographer Charles Heller is so unplugged from daily events that he shows up at work unaware that his fiancée has been executed, on live TV, by terrorists who took over the U.S. Embassy in Munich, Germany. U.S. officials had refused their demands to release two “freedom fighters” from jail and provide them with a means of escaping safely. But after terrorist leader Horst Schrager makes a spectacle of executing a hostage, Heller’s girlfriend, authorities capitulate. The bad guys escape.
Heller is devastated. Not only at the loss of his fiancé, but that the terrorists escaped and his boss Brewer has no immediate plan to bring the murderers to justice. The plan is to follow them to the real leaders and expose their entire network.
When Heller relates this to his girlfriend’s father, the older man recounts how he survived the grief of losing his first family, a wife and two daughters, in Nazi concentration camps. He methodically tracked down the man responsible … and killed him.
The mild-mannered CIA codebreaker and computer whiz is transformed. He uses confidential files he recently decoded to blackmail Brewer into accepting his loony proposition: train him as an assassin and let him track down and kill Schrager and his gang himself. As protection, he’s hidden the evidence and arranged for it to be released should anything happen to him. Brewer agrees, buying time to locate the damaging files.
The race is on. As Heller stumbles through his training, Brewer’s team pursues a scorched earth search to find those damaging files. They have no luck until Heller has just barely made it into then-Czechoslovakia (aka, in the Soviet Union, behind the Iron Curtain). There, through luck more than ingenuity, Heller finds his contact, Elisabeth Vaculik (Marthe Keller), who helps him begin to track his targets, with the CIA nipping at their heels. Heller also attracts the attention of Professor Antonin Lakos (Christopher Plummer), a fellow expert on Elizabethan-era ciphers who believes Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays. Lakos is also, weirdly, the head of local security.
See It
I saw hundreds of movies in the mid-80s. And after rewatching The Amateur recently, I’m not sure why I so distinctly remember it (unlike so many others) all these decades later. Maybe it’s the essential plot, which was fresh back then. Or the chilly winter scenes. Maybe the foreign language dialog that frequently has no subtitles, reinforcing Heller’s feeling of danger and isolation. It can’t be the 1980s tech, not too impressive even in its day and quaint 45 years later. Nope, has to be those first few gripping minutes, watching the terrorists storm the embassy, take hostages, select their victim, and shoot her in the head in front of cameras. Shocking. Appalling.
After that, it’s just another spy movie. Not so exciting, not so authentic, not so riveting as memory would have it. The plot, though not entirely vacuous, is not entirely satisfying either, with its threadbare subtext about the abuse of power. When the bereaved father, watching his house being ransacked by the guys from Langley, says that he’s seen this type of thing before, in Poland, 1940, it’s stretching a bit too hard to grasp the tired cliché (even in 1981) of the CIA as bad guy. It’s particularly lame as a none-too-subtle tipoff to the mandatory twist at the end.
The acting? Just OK. Savage in particular never rises to the occasion. His grief is not as touching as it needs to be, his outrage not so bitter, and his pursuit of the terrorists not so determined. We also get workman-like jobs from Campbell, Hill, and Keller, whose performances are fine, but just fine, nothing distinctive.
Ah, but then, there’s Christopher Plummer. I’m not sure what to make of the off-the-wall subplot involving Elizabethan ciphers and the conference for Anti-Stratfordians where Heller and Lakos first cross paths. I kept looking for it to play a part in untangling some final puzzle. Nada. But Plummer himself is so entirely likable as the bemused spider watching the flies buzzing about that it’s worth watching just for that.
Why recommend it if it doesn’t wow me now after four decades? I was prompted to revisit this 1981 version of The Amateur to make a bookend of watching the latest 2025 respin. Will the newest Amateur sidestep the failings of its original? And … will anyone be as good as Christopher Plummer?