Amsterdam (2022) Film Review

Originally printed in Gair Rhydd

Never before has such a cast amounted to so little. Amsterdam is the latest film from Oscar-nominated and subsequently-Oscar-chasing director David O. Russell. It features three friends: a doctor, a lawyer, and a nurse, all linked by the First World War, who find themselves caught up in “the Business Plot”, a real 1933 political conspiracy in the States, after a mysterious murder of a retired US general. Sound good? It’s lost 20th Century Studios $97 million. Whoops. Its box office failure has done nothing to stifle industry fears that the pandemic has done irreversible, catastrophic damage to the cinema-going habit, and Disney’s apprehensions on how to market films under its latest studio acquisition.  

I would propose this is at most a surprise to its very impressive cast – every role is recognisable by anybody, with Robert De Niro, Margot Robbie and John David Washington taking key roles, an extremely promising line-up of A-listers. Yet, it feels every actor has such a different view on the oddball nature of the film that it renders most of the characters faceless, particularly Washington, who seems utterly jaded. They too have decided the film is neither funny, entertaining, or thoughtful – just oddly flavourless. Christian Bale, who previously worked with Russell on The Fighter and American Hustle, is back, playing Burt Berendsen, an eccentric doctor and war veteran.  

 

It’s welcome that Bale is the most well-suited actor to his character, which you may as well go in expecting due to an extensive roll call including the most emotionally unplaceable Batman and Patrick Bateman, a cultural figure that still refuses to go down gently. Its cast should be ringing their agents and asking for better work than this, especially Bale, already lambasted upon this year in the excruciating waste of time that was Thor: Love and Thunder. Taylor Swift however is surprisingly decent, and surely a far more suitable popstar-turned-actor in the current filmmaking landscape than the depressingly unimpressive Harry Styles.  

 

The film is lengthy at over two hours and the story is complicated, zipping back and forth between America and Amsterdam and the war and 1933, whilst also concerning a wider conspiracy that concerns the way we all know history went. Subsequently, if you aren’t following along closely the sluggish moving pieces of the film, it becomes a set of strange, inexplicable scenes wiping the floor with the narrative. Taylor Swift is pushed under a car. Rami Malek is shot in the face but then he isn’t. A fish-eye close-up of Bale wobbling around, high off painkillers. Predictable Nazi thing turns out to be a Nazi thing. How disappointing. Amsterdam is probably the best case of ‘Oscar-bait’ – a film that tries to include many tropes of Academy Award-winners in hope of winning a few for itself – I have seen. David O. Russell is clearly desperate for one: an unlikable character about who unsettling stories abound. There’s a good, clear difference between being ‘arty’ and ‘sophisticated’ and being plain talky, meandering, and self-indulgent. Amsterdam is firmly the latter.