Set between world wars, Amsterdam chases a trio of unlikely misfits who uncover a conspiracy to replace FDR with a fascist-friendly puppet. As the three sleuths are also old friends with a complicated history and unfinished personal business, we spend nearly as much time exploring their past as we do probing the contemporary plot. That's where the famously free-spirited capital city comes in. Having met in a Dutch military hospital during WWI, grown restless together and summarily escaped, they proceeded to paint the town red until responsibility drew them back home to America and life got in the way.

Given the wealth of potential flavor in the mix, it's downright shocking that this makes for such dull cinema. Secret Nazi societies, mentally-unhinged aristocrats and purveyors of postwar facial prosthetics? Speakeasies and sterilization clinics and posh, theatrical labor rallies? Christian Bale, Robert De Niro and Margot Robbie are here! Taylor Swift gets pushed under a bus! This thing is dying to be all loose and quirky and shocking, trying its hardest to mimic the Coen Brothers, but evidently it took the wrong notes and learned the wrong lessons from that filmography. Like peering through the window of a Ripley's Believe-it Or Not, then visiting a doctor's waiting room instead.