A CIA cryptographer goes into the field following the shocking murder of his wife at the hands of terrorists in The Amateur, which is currently streaming on Hulu in the U.S. and worth revisiting with the release of a 2025 remake starring Rami Malek in cinemas worldwide this weekend. This spy thriller from the Robert Littell novel fails to really connect with its protagonist’s journey, but works on more modest levels, and makes for an especially fascinating watch for Czech audiences.
A Canadian production, The Amateur was largely filmed Toronto but is primarily set locales in then-Czechoslovakia, including Prague and Karlovy Vary. Exterior locations in Vienna stand in for Prague and the cast includes a number of Czech actors who had emigrated to Canada, including Jan Tříska, Jan Rubeš, and Vladimír Valenta. There’s a great deal of Czech dialogue throughout the movie, much of it spoken in almost-convincing fashion by co-star Christopher Plummer, who co-stars as a (benevolent!) Czech intelligence agent.
The Amateur (released in Quebec as L’Homme de Prague, or The Man from Prague) begins in Munich with thrilling scene set at the U.S. Consulate, as a trio of armed terrorists storm in and take hostages. As German and U.S. officials debate about meeting their demands, the lead terrorist takes one of hostages outside and shoots her in the head, in full view of television cameras broadcasting the event to the world.
The murdered woman was Sarah (Lynne Griffin), and her husband Charles Heller (John Savage) is among those watching the event unfold live. Charles just happens to be a code-breaker working for the CIA, and while his superiors (the standard suits played by George Coe, Arthur Hill, and Graham Jarvis) are initially sympathetic to his loss, they’re also strangely ambivalent about tracking down his wife’s killers, who escaped Munich into Czechoslovakia.
“The first 11 minutes will absolutely shock you,” read promotional posters for the film on its original release. “The last 11 minutes will rivet you to your seat.” Indeed, the initial hostage scene is the best in the film, and the finale is also not without suspense.
But there’s some good stuff in-between, too, including Heller’s convoluted plan to enact revenge. He photographs incriminating CIA documents (of only vague importance to the audience, a key misstep in the 2025 film) and threatens to release them to the public—unless the CIA trains him to become a field agent, and sends him behind the Iron Curtain.
Heller’s plan involves Sarah’s father, a Holocaust survivor played by Rubeš as well as an unscrupulous reporter played by John Marley. When the CIA unravels the plan and obtains the photographs, they task Anderson (Ed Lauter) with eliminating Heller—but it’s too late, and he’s already across the Czech-Austrian border.
For locals, the logistics are almost comical: Heller traverses a network of underground tunnels to get across the border, and seems to make his way from Vienna to Prague on foot. Later, when he travels Karlovy Vary, you might stifle laughs at the barren wasteland that stands in for the Czech spa town; the train station sequence almost recalls the Bratislava reveal in Eurotrip, but played entirely straight.
But Vienna does a terrific job of covering for Prague, and the filmmakers even get their geography right, with dialogue mentioning a key location on Krakovská street by the National Museum; you’ll only have to forgive an intersection with Celetná. Prague had been a primary filming location in other American films of the time (Operation Daybreak) and would be used in Yentl and Amadeus in the following years, but a contemporary spy thriller involving the KGB would have probably been a tough ask.
Strangely, the Czech and Russian characters portrayed here are largely sympathetic; it’s the CIA who are out to get Heller. Plummer is a lot of fun as Professor Lakoš, the Czech intelligence officer that forms a bond with our protagonist over a shared interest in cryptography, and a theory that Francis Bacon actually wrote the works of William Shakespeare. If only the plot gave him more to do than follow Heller in a vain attempt to understand what is going on.
But working out just what is happening at the convoluted heart of The Amateur, like a lot of the spy thrillers from the era, is a lot of fun here. What isn’t fun is the film’s revenge movie plotting, which sees Heller track down his wife’s three killers and coldly eliminate them. Marthe Keller (Marathon Man) plays the Prague informant who helps him out; Tříska is a KGB agent whose mistress just happens to be among them.
While the terrorists (played by Chapelle Jaffe, Miguel Fernandes, and Nicholas Campbell) are detestable in the film’s opening scene, they don’t put up the necessary fight for The Amateur to work as a satisfying revenge movie in the vein of a Death Wish or John Wick. And while the story might have worked as a Munich-style rumination on the very nature of revenge, neither the Heller character nor Savage’s performance are interesting enough to resonate with us.
Still, The Amateur works well enough within the confines of a spy movie, with efficient direction by Charles Jarrott and excellent cinematography by John Coquillon (Straw Dogs) that effectively turns both exterior and interior locations in Toronto and Vienna into a nearly-convincing Prague (Karlovy Vary, not so much). This one might be of only minor interest for most audiences, but holds special appeal for Prague locals, as well as those interested in the background of the well-made but generally inferior remake hitting cinemas worldwide this week.
