With the acting and directing talent involved, it's a miracle this oddball project went so wrong. It looks fabulous, the costumes are amazing and there is a beautiful cameo turn from a near unrecognizable Mike Myers...but the script. Yowaza. It's as though O'Russell, realising there was no plot (certainly not enough to sustain 2hrs 14 mins) suddenly heard about Smedley Butler (currently brought back from the dead and doing the rounds as possibly America's greatest hero who tricked the cabal into thinking they could take over America, thereby foiling a plot to topple the President) and cobbled the story onto the end along with a monologue about the importance of love to trick what was left of the listening audience into thinking the film was about something. While most of the big names are lost in the stew, Washington (always brilliant) manages to hold some remnants of a narrative spine together (if only for his own character) while the extraordinary looking Margot Robbie's is nothing more than a stunning muse who is far too aware of her own beauty and the camera to be taken seriously. It's hard to care about anything until Robert de Niro arrives, bringing some gravitas to the hopelessly multi-tonal piece which is not helped by the reliably brilliant Bale's Chaplin-esque take on his character which would be great in any other film, but tonally, not this one. While this is nothing like PTA's The Master, it has the same Emperor's new clothes ring to it, wherein a celebrated auteur is just so brilliant he can knowingly make a pile of meaningless, pretentious twaddle and still fool a studio into handing over the money in celebration of his unfailing genius (both films even refer to the emperor's lack of clothing, a grandiose narcissist in-joke) while their adoring audience will flock in droves to worship at the alter of their brilliance. Only not this time.