After returning home from the war in a back brace and with a glass eye, Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) opened his own facility to help similarly injured veterans and spends his days experimenting with various medicines to help ease his pain.  He is requested to perform an autopsy on General Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), who he served under during the war, and when it is determined that the General died under some mysterious circumstances, and Liz Meekins (Taylor Swift), his daughter, is subsequently murdered, Burt begins to uncover a secret political plot. In order to solve the mystery, he will need to rely on the help of his two best friends: Harold Woodman (John David Washington) and Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), who formed their unbreakable bond back in Amsterdam, after the war. 

Writer/Director David O. Russell returns to the big screen with his absurdly star-powered film, Amsterdam, released by Twentieth Century Studios.  The frantic outing runs long at 134 minutes, hopeful that the carousel of A-List talent will cover the shoddy writing and pacing.  Russell is continuing his trend of manic style, and while Amsterdam is much less abrasive – though no less masturbatory – than his award’s darling American Hustle (2013), the mimicking of style and tone only serves to detract from any enjoyment that could be mined out of this film as it reminds us of the superior works from the style sources; namely the works of Wes Anderson in its camera movements and blocking, Quentin Tarantino in its quirky character construction, and the Coen Brothers in the way the story breaks. 

The hysterics revolve around Burt, a bumbling, good-natured doctor whose voiceover guides much of the film.  Bale, ever the chameleon, surely spent countless hours in the makeup chair teasing at his hair, or being fitted with the wound makeup and bandages which his character dons throughout most of the film’s runtime.  He also gets to show off his comedic skills throughout the zany plot, and while he does prove to have decent timing to land some of the jokes – especially the more physical ones – it does not change the dull nature of the script.  His character is ultimately one-note as he makes his way through life, pining after Beatrice (Andrea Riseborough) an upper-class girl whose family will not allow them to be together and sent him off to Europe to fight in the war and hopefully die.  Blinded by this dead-end love, he cautiously tiptoes around a budding romance with Irma St. Clair (Zoe Saldana), a colleague within the medical profession, but the chemistry is all off and the entire love triangle is a murky mess because Irma is too meek to make her move, Beatrice is not mean enough to tilt favor in any direction, and Burt just exists in the middle of the two women who are unknowingly dueling for his affection. If this is supposed to be a foil to the romance shared between Harold and Valerie, its treatment as a C-plot does it no favors, and it feels like just another tangent Russell is going off on instead of focusing his narrative. 

The chemistry across the board for all of these characters is one of the biggest flaws of the film, and as such wastes the talent of the cast which has been amassed for this venture.  It is hard to even determine what caught Russell’s interest in this story that he overlooked so much on the page because the entire film feels so lifeless and passionless.  It certainly seems ironic that a director notorious for his violent beratements of his cast was drawn to a story about the feel-good power of love and friendship. As a result, none of these characters on the page seem to have any real thought behind them and the actors across the board, despite their caliber, cannot make heads or tails of the dynamics.  The audience is told that this core trio are best friends, but other than occupying the frame at the same time, nothing seen on screen really helps to support that notion.  There is a foundational flashback after Liz Meekins is dispatched that delves into the unlikely meeting of the friends at the heart of the film, but it is little more than aimless wandering and dreamlike photography as they embrace a bohemian lifestyle singing nonsense songs and creating art from the remnants of war in this idyllic version of the titular Amsterdam. We understand that Burt is the third wheel in this arrangement between Harold and Valerie, but the dynamic is both strange and unexplored so that it all just feels unformed. It is treated with such nonchalance – Washington appearing bored given his monotonous tone, Robbie struggling to make sense of the role of a femme fatale but with all the menace and bite of a Care Bear – that it is hard to get invested into the characters because the actors themselves cannot get a decent hold on what the heck is happening in this script that is both sprawling and pointless. 

This extends down to the supporting cast as well, all juiced up with quirks to help texture the world, but as the film drones on and this parade of fools continues, it just serves to aggravate rather than intrigue. One of the grossest examples is the treatment of Libby Voze (Anya Taylor-Joy) whom Russell has written to grow increasingly lustful after the decorated General Gil Dillenbeck (Robert De Niro). Thankfully, Russell controls himself enough to leave this desire one-sided, but the insistence is enough to cause discomfort considering the source. Rami Malek phones in his performance as the store-brand oddball millionaire, Tom, the head of the Voze estate. It is just a watered-down retread of the various quirky characters which Malek has filled his resume with and there is little depth or passion to be found here. Chris Rock’s Milton King has a few scenes, almost all of which are highlighting the race of the characters and the script is either not smart enough or just too disinterested to examine the background of the core trio in any meaningful way, that being: a black man who is romantically interested in a white woman during a segregated period in American history, who spend their time palling around with a Jewish doctor while the political climate in Europe is paving the way for World War II. The film does end on the memory of Amsterdam and the unfortunate thought that the blissful city is going through a tumultuous dynamic shift, but to mistake this subtlety for intention feels like it is giving Rusell, franticly smacking the keys of his typewriter to get out his next shiny new idea in this unfocused mess, far too much credit. 

Amsterdam opens with a mystery, a dead man in a box, and the tensions quickly rise when his daughter is killed after ordering an independent autopsy which discovered poison in the man’s intestines. As the film unfolds, it becomes less of a traditional whodunit mystery and more of a political conspiracy akin to the aforementioned Coen Brothers’ Hail Caeser (2016). Breadcrumbs are dropped by Henry Norcross (Michael Shannon) and Paul Canterbury (Mike Myers), agents working to uncover and dispel the fascist uprising in Europe. These roles, on a better script and under better direction, would be the scene stealers of the film as they pop up every so often to get our heroes out of trouble, and eventually, they come knocking for the favors to be returned, but Shannon and Myers are doing the best they can with the material, and in a world where even the straight man is a loon, these antics just get lost in the background as so much else does in Amsterdam. As for their role in the plot, even without the full backing knowledge of history – though Amsterdam is largely a work of historical fiction – the third act reveal of big bad businessmen looking to guide the United States government to their own beck and call can be sussed out even without trying meaning that the narrative does little else than tread water during its bloated second act and then it finally topples into a lackluster finale. 

David O. Russell is such an odd phenomenon in Hollywood how that, despite the well-documented outbursts on set, A-List talent still flock to be in his pictures. On paper, it makes sense as these whacky-angled historical plots allow them to throw caution to the wind and play big; something the Award’s voters tend to recognize and reward. But his films, especially as of late, fall flat as he builds his style by trying to replicate the authors around him, without being able to understand what makes their signature styles unique to them. Amsterdam turned out to be a massive financial misstep for the studio, and hopefully, it will spell the end of Russell’s assault of – not just of his cast – but also his audience, sparing them of whatever sophomoric idea he wants to point his camera at next thinking of himself as some kind of a pioneer in art.