All-star cast succumbs to convoluted story in muddled screwball comic thriller 'Amsterdam'
“Amsterdam” - ★ ★
A meandering, muddled mixture of manic movie manipulations, David O. Russell's ambitious “Amsterdam” refuses to find its film footing until Robert De Niro mercifully shows up as a steely U.S. Army general to take charge of the story and give us a reason to keep watching.
We'll come back to him in a moment.
“Amsterdam” crams so many characters into so many subplots with so many flashbacks and so many interior monologues that merely attempting to describe it all might trigger a migraine.
Imagine a screwball comic thriller paired with a cautionary historical polemic capped by a mawkish Hallmark-grade plea for love and goodness.
A slightly emaciated Christian Bale plays Burt Berendsen, a half-Jewish, half-Catholic medical doctor searching for new, experimental pain killers for his fellow wounded war veterans. John David Washington plays his most empathetic character so far, lawyer Harold Woodman. Margot Robbie plays a wealthy, quirky artist named Valerie Voze.
They become instant best buds during WWI in France, where Valerie uses the shrapnel and bullets she removes from wounded soldiers to create abstract works of art.
Hey, she's quirky.
The movie actually begins 15 years later in 1933 New York, where a mysterious woman named Liz Meekins (Taylor Swift) asks Burt and Harold for help investigating the suspicious death of her father, army general Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), who had been in charge of their old regiment, the 369th.
When Burt and Harold wind up accused of pushing someone into the path of a speeding car, they must work fast to clear their names. While doing that, they accidentally reconnect with a highly medicated Valerie, whom they last saw when they lived together in postwar Amsterdam.
Valerie now lives at the palatial home of her superrich philanthropist sibling Tom (a deliciously serpentine Rami Malek) and his shrill wife, Libby (Anya Taylor-Joy).
A dense cast of supporting characters includes Irma St. Clair (Zoe Saldaña), a nurse and potential romantic interest for Burt (provided he doesn't reconcile with his estranged wife, Beatrice, played by Andrea Riseborough); Harold's legal assistant Milton (Chris Rock); two cagey intelligence officers (Mike Myers and Michael Shannon), respectively working for Britain and America; and two tattered New York detectives (Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola).
Russell's undisciplined screenplay spends more than an hour setting up an overload of details for a disappointing payoff, principally focusing on Valerie, Harold and Burt as a sort of platonic “Jules and Jim” inspired trio, although the first two eventually get moon-eyed for each other.
You don't really give an Amsterdam about any of this movie until De Niro steps in, emanating a quiet commanding presence missing in action from him for almost two decades.
He plays General Gil Dillenbeck, a tough cookie inspired by Major General Smedley Butler, the most decorated U.S. Marine in history at the time of his 1940 death.
“Amsterdam” now delivers a heavy-handed conspiracy theory-fueled plot involving a shadow group of businessmen who like what's happening over in Italy and Germany so much, they want to recruit the general to lead an abolition of the Constitution and an end to elected presidents.
This effectively scary scenario draws obvious parallels to our nation's current political realities, but then undermines them with an odd nod to Agatha Christie mysteries, as Burt's inner monologue sounds like a Hercule Poirot gathering of suspects in the drawing room to summarize everything that has occurred so far.
“Amsterdam” begins the same way Russell's “American Hustle” began, with a note reading, “A lot of this actually happened.”
Which part?
The clumsily convoluted part?
Or the overwritten and optimistically cheesy part?
Starring: Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Anya Taylor-Joy, Chris Rock, Michael Shannon, Mike Myers, Taylor Swift, Zoe Saldaña, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro
Directed by: David O. Russell
Other: A 20th Century Studios release in theaters. Rated R for bloody images, violence. 134 minutes