Amsterdam takes an incredible cast and some fantastic costume work and turns it into … not much. I can’t even call it nothing, because it’s more than that, but this latest film from David O. Russell, his first since 2015’s Joy, is just indescribably bland. (You can rent it now on amazon and elsewhere.)
The script is the real problem here, as it’s convoluted, undecided about what kind of story it should be, and totally humorless. It’s part mystery, part political thriller, part historical fiction, and mixes in a tepid romance, but fails at virtually all of these things, lacking the tension for the first two or the humor to make it more of a wink and a nod at all of these disparate genres. It’s based on a real episode from U.S. history known as the Business Plot, and creates three protagonists – two wounded vets from World War I in the doctor Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and lawyer Harold Woodsman (John David Washington) plus nurse Valerie (Margot Robbie) – who get pulled into the intrigue, 39 Steps style, when someone they knew in the War shows up dead. That leads to the introduction of a Tolstoy-esque list of characters, adding to some of the confusion of the film and depriving some of the better players here of screen time, before we find out what the conspiracy is and get to the big resolution.
I’m in the target audience for Amsterdam. I like political thrillers, especially of that era, whether we’re talking about the Hitchock oeuvre or novels like The Dark Frontier or Le Carré’s best. I like murder mysteries. I love almost anything set in the 1920s or early 1930s. And I do often fall for movies that are stylish – if the dialogue matches. But Amsterdam doesn’t have a great story, neither in the murder part nor in the political conspiracy part, and the dialogue is drab.
Bale’s character is supposed to be a wiseass, but he’s neither clever nor funny enough to do it, yet he’s too smart to be comic relief. There’s something endearing about his loyalty to his fellow soldiers from their unit – which is itself rooted in kindness, although again, it’s a convoluted back story – but that’s not enough to fully define a three-dimensional character. Robbie can’t help but be endearing, but her character is weird for absolutely no reason at all, making art out of the shrapnel she removes from soldiers’ wounds, something that’s explained at length and then dropped for the rest of the film. Of the big three, Washington’s character is the best defined, and the most interesting, and his understated style works well here. But there are far more actors in this film who are nondescript or actively bad, none more so than Anya Taylor-Joy, who is playing an even more shrill version of her character from Peaky Blinders. She’s supposed to be suspicious, but instead, she’s obvious – and annoying as hell when doing it. Her husband is played by Rami Malek, whose skin condition from No Time to Die has resolved itself but who’s almost simpering here. Robert de Niro deserves credit for a very by-the-book turn as the General whose help the trio needs to secure, as the moment he appeared, I thought we were in for an overacting clinic. He’s quite credible in the part and holds it even when his character has to make a pivotal, emotional speech at the climax.
And that climax is … nothing. This is based on a real story; although the veracity of the accusations of a plot to overthrow the U.S. government remains in dispute, Amsterdam treats it as real, which should make the ending far more exciting. The script here has it end in a meeting and a whimper, although there’s a tussle over a gun that feels forced, like Russell was trying to insert some action into the film but couldn’t figure out how.
I was just never engaged in the story of Amsterdam, and that’s the biggest indictment I can offer. I am an easy mark for everything this script was trying to do, but it’s so busy trying to do so many things that it succeeds at none. The film actually opens with a long flashback sequence to World War I that explains how the dead body connects to Burt and Harold, and how they connect to each other (along with Chris Rock’s character, another member of the same unit), but it comes after a ten-minute or so opening scene that sets up the murder. The flashback itself is padded with too much detail anyway, so by the time we get back to the actual story – which features Taylor Swift as the deceased’s daughter, and she’s also not very good – any momentum that there might have been at that point is long gone. And the one thing that might have salvaged Amsterdam, wry humor, is mostly absent. There are a few attempts at some Marx Brothers-style wisecracking, but those fall flat. No single character is funny, and the script is too self-serious for something this stylized or slick. It’s not actually a bad movie – it’s a movie, and a colorless one at that.