Amsterdam (2022)

Amsterdam is a great example of how hard it is to make a good film. There are so many great elements in the movie but they never quite come together to make something truly cinematic and exciting. There’s an all-star cast, a fairly competent well-known director and a fascinating snippet of North American history for them to work with. All the pieces for a fun night at the movies are here but it never manages to do anything significant with them.

The performances that the central trio of Bale, Robbie and Washington give are good, but pale in comparison to a lot of their other work. In classic Christain Bale fashion, he wears a period-accurate back brace for the whole film. The commitment adds something to Bale’s character as it affects the way he moves and forces him into a sort of hunched stature. Robbie's character probably has the most depth to her out of the leading three as the unstable nurse, Valarie Voze. Washington’s performance is enough to suffice but the character of Harold Woodman is fairly hollow and uninteresting. This feeling of wasted effort permeates through the rest of the film. There is so much money time and energy clearly present on screen but it fails to ever accomplish something cinematic with those elements.

David O Russel has had some success in the past with The Fighter (2010), Silver Linings Playbook (2013) and American Hustle (2013). In 2015 Russel would go on to direct Joy and Accidental Love. Neither of his two 2015 releases would garner much praise from critics or audiences. Whatever magic he had was lost after the run of films from 2010-2013. This return shows that the industry has not forgotten his name but they will be much less likely to fund a picture like this again. Amsterdam has a reported budget of 80 million and made an underwhelming 28 million worldwide. In comparison, some other mid-budget films of the year like Bullet Train or Ticket to Paradise were much more successful. Of course, the box office doesn’t represent the quality of a film but it does tell us something about what people are willing to pay to see. Audiences clearly still like movie stars like Brad Pitt in Bullet Train or Julia Roberts and George Clooney in Ticket to Paradise. A film like Amsterdam is a hard sell nowadays. People most often want to see things that feel familiar, something they can bank on enjoying without knowing too much about it. Every once in and while the average filmgoer will take a risk and see something they don’t know much about that looks interesting. Amsterdam with its never-ending cast of stars of the past and present has the ability to entice those filmgoers. Unfortunately, Amsterdam will only reinforce the trepidation of exploring something new.

(20th Century Studios)

Russel gets so caught up in the stars on the screen and the ridiculous story that he forgets to actually make a movie. The cameos are endless and none of them really feel natural. All the performances feel genuine but it’s almost as if no one knows which movie they are supposed to be in. Ultimately most of the casting was done to put names on posters. Because projects like Amsterdam are so hard to sell, it seems David O Russel was more concerned with enticing audiences superficially, rather than just making a good movie.

At the core of all the films’ many flaws, sit a very interesting story from American history. An alleged coup attempt in 1933 to overthrow Rosevelt and instate a dictatorship. Russel’s screenplay takes many liberties with this story. The plot becomes very convoluted by the end of the film. There are so many disjointed plotlines running alongside each other that are hastily forced together as things being to climax. Some elements of the story seem to exist just to introduce another character. Each character introduced feels like an excuse for another cameo.

In a year where theatre attendance is finally starting to see a rise after the pandemic, Amsterdam only reminds people to wait until movies are released for home viewing. It's sad to see so much talent and hard work wasted on David O Russel's attempt to attain some relevancy in the 2020s. This film isn’t going to go down as one of the worst movies of the year, it will suffer an even worse fate. It will be forgotten.