Film Preview: The Amateur (2025)

Film Poster

Page Revisions:

(December 15, 2024) Original
(March 9, 2025) New Trailer (#2)
(March 23, 2025) New Trailers (#3-#4) — New Posters (#2-#6)

Release Date:

April 11, 2025

Synopsis:

From IMDb: “Follows a CIA cryptographer, who manages to blackmail his agency into training him to let him go after a group of terrorist who killed his wife in London.”

Poster Rating: C / C / C / C- / A / C+

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Review: (#1, C) There isn’t much to this. Perhaps you can figure out the locale of the film from this but it’s not very important. The title has a cyber-like appeal but the whole is just so uneventful.

(#2, C) For a supposedly major motion picture, it sure lives up to its title with regard to its poster design. While there’s at least a background here, it adds little to the overall design. (#3, C) A simple design that at last has some interesting detail in the IMAX lettering, the colors are appealing though perhaps too uniform. (#4, C-) Taking out any background detail doesn’t embellish a design, especially one that looks as amateurish as this. (#5, A) They finally got one that’s worth looking at. Bold and fitting color selection and an intriguing bullseye motif using towers in each of its locales to point to the titular hero. It’s a strong design. One of the best of the year so far. (#6, C+) Then you have something like this, which looks like a cheap paper target at some backwoods shooting range.

Trailer Rating: B / C / C- / C

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Review: (#1, B) Rami Malek still doesn’t look like he can act his way out of a paper bag but the surrounding concept certainly has merit. At moments riveting, this trailer does a very good job of making the themes feel resonant and intriguing.

(#2, C) It almost feels like the designers intentionally avoided giving the audience more details than the first film. They relied on the sensational pool scene for both and ended up making the film look less exciting and more generic as a result.

(#3, C-) Hinging your entire marketing campaign on a single, admittedly cool scene, but to the exclusion of all else is folly. That’s why this teaser doesn’t work.

(#4, C) Trying to backtrack after that third trailer, this fourth does almost the same thing, focusing on the pool scene, but tries to embed more information about the narrative into it. Unfortunately for the producers, this isn’t far enough removed from any of the prior efforts to support its own existence.