The Amateur (James Hawes, 2025) & The Last Showgirl (Gia Coppola, 2024)

The Amateur is the professional looking but ultimately rather pedestrian remake of the 1981 spy movie, which was also based on the bestseller by Robert Littell.

Working from a script by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, the new movie is directed efficiently but also a little anonymously by James Hawes (Slow Horses, One Life).

It stars Rami Malek as the CIA-nerd Charlie Heller, who basically forces his superiors to turn him into a (rogue) agent after his wife (Rachel Broshanan) is killed during a terrorist attack on the hotel in London where she was staying for work reasons.

When the CIA waits too long in going after the killers (why? you may wonder) Charlie decides to go it alone. Even though his trainer, played by Laurence Fishburne tells him to his face he doesn’t have it in him to shoot someone at close range.

But in this techno heavy revenge thriller there are other interesting ways to kill someone. Ultimately, that’s also part of the problem. Charlie is supposed to impress you, not by his physical prowess or his fighting abilities, but with his superior intelligence. Most of the time, though, we just see the end result and not the intellectual process that precedes it.

In fact, Charlie relies on technology so much, sitting behind his desk, or hunched over his laptop, that as an actor Malek doesn’t really have enough to do. And since he also produced the movie, that’s a bit of a shame.

The Amateur does boast a sleek production design, and some nice looking European locations, since most of the baddies are from there. But their characters are paper thin and the movie never racks up any real tension, nor does it set the pulse racing, not with thrills, nor with memorable dialogue.

It is not all bad. There are a couple of decent twists along the way, Laurence Fishburne is fine, as always, and Catriona Balfe has an interesting supporting turn, that I will not spoil for you. On the other hand, second billed Rachel Broshanan gets very little to do in the limited time she is on screen, while the great Jon Bernthal is basically wasted in a role that either doesn’t make a lot of sense or was meant to be a kind of joke that I didn’t get. Unless, of course, his character is being set up for a meatier role in a sequel that probably will never happen.

I’m not saying there isn’t an audience for a movie like the The Amateur, just that it’s a busy genre. At times the movie reminded me a little of Enemy Of The State, at others of The Bourne Identity with a bit of Mission: Impossible thrown in. But The Amateur doesn’t really have an identity of its own, or at least not enough.

The Amateur will probably work best as casual entertainment on a long distance flight or train ride.

I didn’t mind seeing it, but I can’t really recommend it.

I give it 2 1/2 stars.

THE LAST SHOWGIRL (Gia Coppola, 2024)

Pamela Anderson plays the role of a lifetime in The Last Showgirl, a tender and quietly affecting drama by Gia Coppola.

I was never into Baywatch, the series that made Anderson famous, so I never really worried whether she could act or not. I just assumed she could, given the right role and director.

With The Last Showgirl that opportunity came along at last. It’s a fearless performance, Anderson playing a 57-year old showgirl who discovers that she has finally reached her sell-by date, when the ‘rhinestones, feathers and sequins’ show Le Razzle Dazzle she’s been part of for thirty years closes and she’s cruelly though not unfairly rejected at her next audition, where she lies to the director that she’s 36, before adding: ‘I lied, I’m actually 42.’

With the show she not only played Las Vegas, but also lived her dreams, as she toured the world, even having her picture taken on the Chinese Wall by one of the major American weekly magazines. As a consequence she sacrificed much of her relationship with her daughter Hannah (Billie Lourd), who was mostly raised by family that Shelly isn’t really in contact with.

With Le Razzle Dazzle about to close, Shelly is thrown for a loop and she tries to re-establish contact with Hannah, who is not afraid to tell her to her face that Shelly sucked at being a mom. Which is true, but also a little ironic, as Shelly serves as a surrogate mom to some of the younger dancers on her show, like Mary-Anne (Brenda Song) and Jodie (Kiernan Shipka), a 19-year old girl who is discovering that leaving home for a show like Le Razzle Dazzle means she can never really go home again.

There is also a father figure in the form of stage manager Eddie (Dave Bautista), a gentle soul who treats the women with respect, and Shelly also has a best friend / sister type in Annette, a former Le Razzle Dazzle dancer who tries to make a modest living as a cocktail waitress at the same casino, until she is once again replaced by younger faces.

Speaking of the show, we never get too see much of it, with director Coppola, perhaps wisely, focusing on what happens backstage and in the private lives of the characters, which allows her to draw rich performances from her entire cast.

Cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw mostly drapes the movie in soft tones, but even though The Last Showgirl functions, at least in part, as a loving ode to a Parisian-influenced part of Las Vegas culture that is slowly disappearing, the screenplay by Kate Gersten isn’t blind to the dark side of the American dream, with impending poverty always a threat.

It makes you wonder what will happen to Shelly when she leaves the spotlight after the final curtain call, even though by that time she has proved, like Pamela Anderson, to be a real showbizz survivor.

I give it four stars!