Reputed to be in development as a reboot for Hugh Jackman for a good few years now, Charles Jarrott’s The Amateur is a tense, effective revenge thriller than makes the best of its mix of cold-blooded espionage and hot-blooded anger. A sense of righteous grievance is harnessed by a shocking opening as a terrorist gang storm the American embassy in West Germany and execute an American (Sarah Kaplan) while being filmed by live-tv crews. Widower Charles Heller (John Savage) is no secret agent, his speciality is mathematics and decoding messages, but when the CIA intelligence forces that he works for don’t respond for political reasons, Heller takes things into his own hands by infiltrating Eastern Bloc spy-networks in the hope of finding who killed his wife. This is all rather more plausaible that usual, Heller uses his ability to hack into the CIA files to find declassified information and force the CIA to offer him some grudging support by blackmailing them; The Amateur makes a virtue of its savvy view of dirty black ops. Christopher Plummer, Marthe Keller and Arthur Hill are all names familiar to genre fans, and Robert Littell’s screenplay ducks many of the clichés expected. The Amateur seems to have been taken out of the system for some reason; just for fun, below is included a link to purchase a DVD for a cool $100 plus. Why that should be so high is an interesting question; The Amateur does a violent but professional wet job that should have left more of a cultural imprint than it did.
It feels like Ridley Scott’s take on the John Paul Getty kidnapping has never been mentioned without a comment on Kevin Spacey and his replacement with Christopher Plummer after the initial shoot was completed. That’s a pity, because the central focus of a film should not be about an actor who doesn’t appear. Plummer does such a good job as Getty, a billionaire who lives so frugally that he washes his own socks in the sink of his hotel room, that no explanation is required for his casting. Michelle Williams and Mark Wahlberg are both solid as the kidnapped boy’s mother and the security guard who helps her get her boy back, but it’s a director’s film. Scott conjures up Italy in the 1970’s with great style, and there’s several tense sequences that have just the right Poliziotteschi feel. It’s a real shame that All the Money In the World ended up turning audiences off due to marketing disasters; it’s Scott’s best film in 20 years.
The very idea of a 1080p or Blu-ray quality version of Starcrash is something bizarre; at the highest definition, it still looks like five different films stitched together. But what films? There’s a Star Wars rip-off, with typically 1978 spaceships, lazers and robots. There’s a Flesh Gordon/Barbarella sex-comedy, with Caroline Munro’s outfits suitable for kids of a certain age. There’s cod-Ray Harryhausen stop motion including weird giant statue, and there’s insane support from Joe Spinell as a galaxy emperor, David Haseelhoff as a Han Solo type, and notably from Christopher Plummer, who gets to deliver an incredible closing speech that aptly summarises the complete farrago what’s just unfolded. A wonderful mess on a par with Luigi Cozzi’s similarly bonkers The Humanoid, Starcrash is the ideal film to zone out and just go with it, whatever it is.
