- Title: Amsterdam
- IMDb: link
Loosely based on real events, David O. Russell‘s uneven film follows the travails of three friends and survivors of World War I (Christian Bale, John David Washington, and Margot Robbie) who for a time lived together in Amsterdam before being reunited later in New York and embroiled in a murder mystery involving a poisoned general (Ed Begley Jr.) and the daughter (Taylor Swift) who police mistakenly believe the two men pushed in front of a moving car. True events involve a mysterious organization and their plans to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
While the unusual plot is an interesting subject to explore, it is not the focus of the film instead exploring the relationship between the fictional three main characters and their own troubles. Despite a strong cast that also includes Zoe Saldana, Robert De Niro, Rami Malek, and Anya Taylor-Joy, and Russell leaning into the usual odd tone of his characters, the film is ultimately unusual without being all that interesting.
While Russell provides a collection of odd characters for his actors to sink their teeth into, ultimately there isn’t much for them to do other than revel in that oddness. Both a critical and box office failure, Amsterdam can never quite figure out what it wants to be while attempting to jump from screwball comedy to mystery thriller to the friendship and romance of an unlikely throuple, just to name three, and it takes far, far too long to get into the events of the bizarre plot on which the movie is based. Amsterdam fails in doing any one of these stories, or their clashing tones, proper service while also introducing, but not ever really exploring, themes of race and class struggle.
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