Amsterdam

Grade: C

A friend of mine described the trailer for Amsterdam perfectly. “It looks amazing, but I have no idea what it’s about.” Having seen the movie, out in theaters today, I feel the same way.

Director David O. Russell’s work has always been a very mixed bag for me. I haven’t had any desire to see Three Kings again after my one and only viewing in 1999. I didn’t see Flirting With Disaster or I Heart Huckabees. Silver Linings Playbook was a beautiful, glorious warm hug – one of my favorite movies of the decade. American Hustle was decent and looked great visually. Joy started out all over the place, but eventually found its bearings and ended up playing pretty well.

Amsterdam is like Joy if it had never settled down. It contains so many ideas, subplots, characters, and seems to go off on a thousand tangents. It lingers on numerous flights of fancy that apparently the filmmakers found interesting, but I didn’t. Martin Scorsese, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Quentin Tarantino are masters at creating big ambitious stories that manage to take us on an exhilarating journey with levels. Respectively, their films Casino, Boogie Nights, and Django Unchained were long, but made me lean in and be invested at every twist and turn. Amsterdam falls more into the category of Wes Anderson, who obviously has talent, but whose work I am increasingly annoyed by each time.

This is an impressive cast here. We have Christian Bale, John David Washington (who sounds just like his father, Denzel), Margot Robbie, Rami Malek, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Timothy Olyphant, Taylor Swift, Robert De Niro – and I’m just naming the people I’ve heard of. Thank God for De Niro, who remains the old pro he is, and gives the movie some semblance of structure when he finally shows up. Certain scenes are satisfying in and of themselves, only to be abandoned and off to the next thing, just as we are getting engrossed in them.

I realize I haven’t said a thing about the plot, but it doesn’t matter much anyway. It’s all a lot of hot air. Amsterdam is overblown, self-indulgent, and lacks focus.

Grade: C