{"id":9638,"date":"2022-11-21T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9638"},"modified":"2022-11-21T00:10:22","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T05:10:22","slug":"amsterdam-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2022\/11\/21\/amsterdam-movie\/","title":{"rendered":"Amsterdam (movie)."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Amsterdam<\/em> takes an incredible cast and some fantastic costume work and turns it into \u2026 not much. I can\u2019t even call it nothing, because it\u2019s more than that, but this latest film from David O. Russell, his first since 2015\u2019s Joy<\/em>, is just indescribably bland. (You can rent it now on amazon<\/a> and elsewhere.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The script is the real problem here, as it\u2019s convoluted, undecided about what kind of story it should be, and totally humorless. It\u2019s 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\u2019s based on a real episode from U.S. history known as the Business Plot, and creates three protagonists \u2013 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) \u2013 who get pulled into the intrigue, 39 Steps<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m in the target audience for Amsterdam<\/em>. I like political thrillers, especially of that era, whether we\u2019re talking about the Hitchock oeuvre or novels like The Dark Frontier<\/em> or Le Carr\u00e9\u2019s 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 \u2013 if the dialogue matches. But Amsterdam<\/em> doesn\u2019t have a great story, neither in the murder part nor in the political conspiracy part, and the dialogue is drab.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bale\u2019s character is supposed to be a wiseass, but he\u2019s neither clever nor funny enough to do it, yet he\u2019s too smart to be comic relief. There\u2019s something endearing about his loyalty to his fellow soldiers from their unit \u2013 which is itself rooted in kindness, although again, it\u2019s a convoluted back story \u2013 but that\u2019s not enough to fully define a three-dimensional character. Robbie can\u2019t 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\u2019 wounds, something that\u2019s explained at length and then dropped for the rest of the film. Of the big three, Washington\u2019s 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<\/em>. She\u2019s supposed to be suspicious, but instead, she\u2019s obvious \u2013 and annoying as hell when doing it. Her husband is played by Rami Malek, whose skin condition from No Time to Die<\/em> has resolved itself but who\u2019s 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\u2019s quite credible in the part and holds it even when his character has to make a pivotal, emotional speech at the climax.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And that climax is \u2026 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<\/em> 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\u2019s a tussle over a gun that feels forced, like Russell was trying to insert some action into the film but couldn\u2019t figure out how.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was just never engaged in the story of Amsterdam<\/em>, and that\u2019s the biggest indictment I can offer. I am an easy mark for everything this script was trying to do, but it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 which features Taylor Swift as the deceased\u2019s daughter, and she\u2019s 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<\/em>, 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\u2019s not actually a bad movie \u2013 it\u2019s a movie, and a colorless one at that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Amsterdam takes an incredible cast and some fantastic costume work and turns it into \u2026 not much. I can\u2019t even call it nothing, because it\u2019s more than that, but this latest film from David O. Russell, his first since 2015\u2019s Joy, is just indescribably bland. (You can rent it now on amazon and elsewhere.) The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1290,102,720,215,219,434],"class_list":["post-9638","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2022-movies","tag-disappointments","tag-historical-films","tag-movies","tag-mysteries","tag-thrillers","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9638"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9640,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9638\/revisions\/9640"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}