Doctor Christian Bale, one-eyed veteran of the Great War, gets called in by best friend, lawyer John David Washington, to do an autopsy on their commanding officer, General Ed Begley Jr. Daughter Taylor Swift suspects foul play; Bale and Zoe Saldana discover what may be poison in his gut. When they go to tell Miss Swift, she gets thrown under a truck; the guy who did it starts screaming that Bale and Washington did it, and they have to start running for their lives and investigate. We then flash back to the end of the War, with Bale and Washington sharing an apartment in Amsterdam with Washington's lover, Margot Robie.

At this point, I expected it all to turn into some vast, world-girdling conspiracy, like mid-life Hitchcock, and so it did, eventually, but first director David O. Russell needs to do some rambling with MI-6, the Bonus Marchers, some scenes lifted from Raymond Chandler shot as if they're done in two-strip Technicolor, and a detective who looks like a skinny William Bendix. Russell has enough pull in Hollywood to get some major stars in minor roles, including Chris Rock, Michael Shannon & Mike Myers (playing some spies with a birdwatching fetish that suggests Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford), Timothy Olyphant, and Robert DeNiro as a Smedley Butler knockoff. The script deals with real issues of 1933, the year it's set in; it also links up with current geopolitical issues, which is probably why the particularly star-studded cast.

It rambles, as I said, but the details are so entertaining that more than two hour went by very easily.