Charlie (Rami Malek) doesn’t like to fly, and he doesn’t like to take risks. It’s something his wife, Sarah (Rachel Brosnahan) teases him about, so much so that she gifts him with an old Cessna plane, squirreled away in a barn on their rural Virginia property, to help him to conquer his fears.

As the titular character of “The Amateur,” Charlie comes off as timid and cautious, both at home and in his professional life as a decoder at the CIA. But Charlie’s life changes in an instant when Sarah is murdered during a terrorist attack in London, and blinded by grief, he discovers the breadth of his unique skill set outside the walls of the George Bush Center for Intelligence. Fear of flying? Aversion to risk? That all goes out the window when he’s driven by vengeance.

“The Amateur,” from “Slow Horses” director James Hawes, written by Ken Nolan and Gary Spinelli, who adapted the novel by Robert Littell, presents as a globe-trotting spy thriller, and begs the question, “what if Jason Bourne was a nerd?” Charlie isn’t saddled with amnesia, he’s stuck with his own fumbling abilities at real-world spycraft and unwillingness to shoot another human being at close range — something he’ll have to work around if he wants to achieve the justice he believes Sarah deserves.

It’s a clever premise, and Malek works well in the role, with his unusually angular face and haunted eyes, constantly scanning his environments, both physical and digital. “The Amateur” is handsomely made, it’s style and pace appealingly fluid, propelled by a Volker Bertelmann score. The supporting cast is full of aces, with Holt McCallany and Julianne Nicholson as CIA higher-ups, Lawrence Fishburne as the man they call in to train Charlie, Jon Bernthal as a charismatic field agent, and Catriona Balfe as a mysterious international liaison. All of the elements are there, but the film is frustratingly inert.

“The Amateur” starts off promising, as Charlie takes the investigation of his wife’s murder into his own hands, putting his technical mastery to use in mapping out the events of that day and tracking down her killers, which takes about 30 seconds. When the CIA drags their feet on eliminating them, Charlie goes rogue. He secrets away a trove of incriminating documents about a nasty false flag operation and cover-up, which he uses as leverage to demand his own field training.

As their patience runs out on this hastily arranged bargain, Charlie manages to give the feds the slip and sets out on his own, ready or not. It’s when our man touches down in Europe that “The Amateur” starts to spin its wheels. There’s a total lack of suspense as he tracks down the mercenaries responsible for Sarah’s death and takes out them out using his own creative means. Unfortunately, the trailer spoils one of the film’s most outlandish assassinations, so it unfolds with all of the energy of a joke you’ve already heard.

That’s a key part of the problem with “The Amateur,” in which it always feels like we’re ahead of the story, instead of playing catch-up and trying to figure out a mystery. There are pops of surprise, especially as Charlie demonstrates his newfound aptitude for improvised explosive devices, but there’s no mystery. He simply lays it all out for us and then things proceed as expected. There’s no thrill or shock at any of the twists or reveals: he is a vengeful grieving husband who goes after the people he identifies as his wife’s killers, and he executes his task in a very straightforward manner. At least “John Wick” did it artfully.

Bernthal is painfully underutilized, though he manages to make a whole meal out of his limited role. Hawes has at his disposal one of the greatest cinematic tools afforded a filmmaker — a third-act Michael Stuhlbarg monologue — but not even that can save “The Amateur.” Both actors bring a little life to the proceedings, but not enough to revive this corpse.

Ultimately, “The Amateur” is more of an emotional journey than a rip-roaring mystery thriller, but why on earth would we prefer the former over the latter in this context? Charlie keeps declaring that Sarah “mattered” to his superiors and to his enemies, but we only know that because he keeps insisting upon it, not because we know anything about her, beyond her penchant for quirky gift-giving.