Rami Malek | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The new movie “The Amateur” is a good example of a great idea for an action movie with bad execution.

A married couple Heller, played by Rami Malek and Sarah Rachel Brosnahan are separated when Sarah is on a business trip in London. Heller is a computer expert who works for the CIA. After Heller’s wife tragically is killed in a Terrorist attack, he decides to take matters into his own hands, even though he has no skills as a CIA field agent. Heller is trained privately by an x-agent Henderson, played by Laurence Fishburne, who determines that Heller does not have the physical strength, is not a killer and because of this, he should not continue on his quest for justice.

The problem with this film is that there are no connections between scenes, no buildup or explanation as to why something is happening, or why Heller is motivated to do what he is doing. Characters pop in and out of nowhere, and we all wonder how a screenplay this poorly written was greenlighted.

Other characters in this film include a CIA agent named “The Bear” played by Jon Bernthal, with a small and mostly unnecessary role, and Holt McCallany as CIA Director Moore. This film represents another very good opportunity lost because nobody realized that the screenplay needed about five more rewrites and moved into production too soon probably because of budget cuts.

This time around I 100% agree with the very low 61% ratings on Rotten Tomatoes and do not recommend this movie.

“The Little Things”, like the recent release of “Wonder Woman 1984” has been released in theaters and on HBO Max for one month. Due to the pandemic, the movie industry is slowly changing into new methods of release and distribution. Odds are many of these new movie distribution ideas will remain, long after the Covid-19 Pandemic is over.

Considering 3 Academy award winning actors, Denzel Washington, Rami Malek, Jared Leto – agreeing to make this movie, one would have thought from the start, that the script would have been outstanding. It is not. Most of this story about a washed up cop Joe Deacon, played by Washington and a detective Jim Baxter played by Malek trying to find a serial killer seemed like a bad TV movie with a plot and action that we have all seen way too many times. I wondered during this entire boring film whether this entire bad production was made, only because of the drastic drawdown of the movie industry, due to this almost year long Pandemic. Everybody involved had to find a film that is less risky and low budget because of the continuing worry that so few people want to risk going to the movies. Unfortunately, the end result is a bad movie.

This time around the critics are accurate with their low 49% rating and this movie should definitely be missed because it is a waste of the talents of 3 A-list actors.