Review of “Amsterdam”: The worst film of the year makes Oscar nominees appear inexperienced

For months, “Amsterdam,” a brand-new film, has been cloaked in mystery. We now understand why: it’s unbearable.

 

I thought about leaving several times during the press screening of David O. Russell’s enormous snoozer on Wednesday night. After 45 minutes, one significant critic got up from his seat and left the room. Meet the world’s luckiest man!

 

But instead, I stayed to see the drama, which was as emotionally confusing as it was incredibly boring and difficult to understand. That’s strange because the movie seems like it has all the makings of a classic on paper.

 

Russell (“Silver Linings Playbook,” “The Fighter,” “American Hustle”), the film’s director and writer, is a seasoned storyteller. And he put together a strong cast of A-list celebrities, including Taylor Swift, Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro, Chris Rock, and Anya Taylor-Joy. A botched attempt to topple the government and establish a fascist dictator is the subject of the interesting plot, which centres on a little-known but important episode in American history. Neat.

 

“Amsterdam” has every possible benefit. Nothing matters. It’s the worst movie of the year so far, and I’ll submit to anything that surpasses it.

 

The story of the floperoo is set in 1933 New York City, where Burt (Bale), a veteran of World War I, works as a doctor treating men who have been wounded in war. Harold (Washington), his closest friend from the 369th Infantry Regiment, is a lawyer, and both are asked, film-noir style, by Liz (Swift, who will have a hard time shaking this one off), to perform a brutal autopsy on her deceased politician father. (Zoe Saldana plays an unappreciated nurse who messes around with intestines.) Liz is interested in learning more about his enigmatic passing.

 

Once again transported to 1918 France, where a strange nurse named Valerie (Margot Robbie), who collects bullets and shrapnel, is helping the lads heal, Burt and Harold become embroiled in a fresh murder investigation. Valerie and Harold start dating, everyone dances, and they all create hazy paintings as the group becomes friends and takes off for Amsterdam.

 

We gradually become aware of Russell’s troubling identity issue as a director. He is channelling Robert Zemeckis by creating a multidecade epic about battles, history, and prosthetics. Badly. And he’s trying to mimic Wes Anderson by casting a Vanity Fair Oscars party of famous people to play dry eccentrics in a washed-out colour scheme. badly once more. It strongly resembles Adam McKay’s “The Big Short” and “Vice” in terms of grating smugness.

 

There is nothing left of what Russell is so admired for. Where is “Playbook’s” indie soul? The “The Fighter’s” rawness? The sexiness and enjoyment of “American Hustle” amazes me. The only characteristic of “Amsterdam” is incompetence.

 

When we go back to the 1930s and encounter CIA and MI-5 agents (Michael Shannon and Mike Myers), who have side jobs as glass-eye salesmen and a passion for taxidermy birds, the story is no easier to follow. The same is true when the wealthy Vozes, played by Malek and Taylor-Joy, who are strange, powerful, sinister, and boring, arrive.

 

De Niro is subsequently introduced as a general who Burt wants to speak at his upcoming veterans’ banquet in Manhattan, but other forces want to use him to overthrow the US government.

 

Rock portrays Milton, a different veteran who periodically issues lofty proclamations against racism in the manner of a stand-up comedian. No one in the theatre laughs at the jokes that everyone on the screen is telling. We’re too preoccupied trying to understand what the heck is happening.

 

Let’s just say that Swift, who is not an actress, and the strongest Swiffer in the world could not clean up this mess.

 

On the other hand, many of the actresses she performs alongside are often top-notch yet lack professionalism in this situation. Bale yuks it up as Washington moves away. Robbie gives us a Harley Quinn-lite, and Malek and Taylor-Joy seem unable to control their obsession to acting like Martians. De Niro is only present, not bad.

 

With the hack job script Russell has written and the amorphous tone he has suddenly preferred, the actors really has nothing to work with. Everyone speaks in a distant manner, as if they are reading off cue cards. The general lack of commitment must have been a directive. Russell yelled, “Blander! Blander!”

 

Seven years have passed since the director’s last film, “Joy.” Here’s hope that he rediscovers happiness, humour, tension, structure, character development, conversation, and so on when the next one comes along.