The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D
Back when The Simpsons was funny, which was decades ago at this point, one of my favorite gags was when Grandpa Simpson would tell a story that didn’t go anywhere (“so I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time…..now to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days nickels had pictures of bees on them…..”). Watching Amsterdam feels like a Grandpa Simpson speech about World War 1, except that the movie isn’t in on the joke. This is one of the most meandering and unfocused scripts to ramble onto a screen in recent memory, transforming what should have been a quirky murder mystery into a maddening test of patience and a textbook lesson on poor screenwriting.
Burt and Harold (played by Christian Bale and John David Washington, respectively) are injured in battle during World War 1 and sent to the hospital. A nurse named Valerie (played by Margot Robbie) fixes their wounds and the three of them become the best of friends. They move to Amsterdam together after the war and, as we’re told through montages, deepen their bond over months of drinking and dancing. These are meant as the foundational scenes of the movie, establishing the unshakeable friendship between these three, but we are never really given much as the basis for that relationship. There are no long, deep conversations that establish their bond through the horrors of war, just some drunken dancing. For a film that runs 2 hours and 14 minutes, these early segments are oddly rushed and leave us with no investment in any of these people or a real understanding of the vow that exists between them.
We move 15 years into the future and our characters now reside in New York City. Burt is now a doctor, Harold is a lawyer and Valerie is old-money rich, a fact that she never mentioned before for some reason. Burt and Harold find out that their commanding officer during the war (who we don’t know anything about, but the movie wants us to consider important) has died. His daughter, Elizabeth, suspects that he was murdered, so Burt performs an autopsy and discovers poison in his system. They go to inform Elizabeth that her suspicions are true, but she is pushed into traffic and killed. Bystanders believe that Burt and Harold killed her (even though they very obviously didn’t) and the three friends must solve the mystery and clear their names.
At this point, we are pretty much being given what was promised by the film’s trailers and I was somewhat on board with it. Somewhat. The writing was sloppy, but I’m a sucker for a murder mystery, especially a quasi-noir murder mystery set in the 1930s. Unfortunately, that’s not the movie that we get. In actuality, Amsterdam is (very) loosely based on a real-life incident called the Business Plot, when a group of American businessmen that sympathized with Hitler and Mussolini planned a military coup to overthrow Franklin D. Roosevelt and replace him with Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler. Didn’t see that one coming, did you? It’s like watching a slasher movie that suddenly decides that it wants to be about the Cuban Missile Crisis.
If you’re wondering how the murder mystery plot morphs into a story about overthrowing the U.S. government, don’t worry because I’m wondering the same thing and I saw the damn movie. At about the halfway point of Amsterdam, it occurred to me that I had spaced out and had no fucking idea what was happening. I don’t feel bad about that, either, as this is a movie that dares you to pay attention to it. Characters appear and then disappear. Plot threads are introduced and then go nowhere. Endless subplots are piled on top of each other, despite ultimately having very little to do with each other. After a while, Amsterdam no longer feels like a movie in any coherent sense of the word. It feels like a random collection of scenes, each less interesting than the one before it, until the credits finally roll and the audience departs the theater in a confused haze.
Amsterdam had a ridiculous $80 million production budget, most of which was seemingly spent on a completely wasted ensemble cast. Most of the cast members can’t even seem to agree on the type of film that they are making. Christian Bale seems to think that he is in a screwball comedy (even though there are no jokes) while Margot Robbie seems to be in a quirky drama. John David Washington seems to think he’s in a coma and gives one of the most wooden, boring performances that I can recall. It would have helped me stay awake if he occasionally expressed an emotion, any frigging emotion, at any point in the movie. Taylor Swift shows up for about 90 seconds, which is about 30 seconds more than she needed to confirm that she isn’t an actress. Rami Malek turns up as a Nazi, which is interesting casting considering he’s frigging Egyptian. The film is an endless parade of big names: Anya Taylor Joy, Zoe Saldaña, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Chris Rock and others all come and go with little to do, passing through the film and taking their subplots with them as they depart. Robert De Niro finally shows up as the General, a role that he proves that he could play in his sleep by seemingly actually playing the role in his sleep.
As of this writing, I haven’t seen any of writer/director David O. Russell previous films, but I know that he is a critical darling and I’m honestly surprised that Amsterdam has been savaged by critics because this is the kind of nonsensical, pretentious bullshit that usually does very well come awards season. It reminds me of a Wes Anderson movie in terms of plotting, dialogue and casting, so maybe O. Russell just needed to film every actor in the center of the camera frame and put a solid pastel background behind them to earn more critical favor. Either way, Amsterdam is a disjointed mess that will quickly fade into obscurity in the back of my mind.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amsterdam_(2022_film)#/media/File:Amsterdam_(2022_film).jpg
