Start with the positives, always try to start with the positives, even when it's hard. David O. Russell really assembled a star studded and talented cast for Amsterdam and while I don't think any of them give transcendent performances, they're all respectively good. Weird and quirky characters are like catnip to Bale, Robbie does a good job of being eccentric and while Washington is really subdued, it's what's needed of him in the movie and he gets the job done. The supporting players are also solid, Mike Myers got a couple of laughs out of me which is about the highest compliment I can give. It makes me wonder how many of them read the script or if Russell's name just carried enough weight for them to sign off but I digress. I don't want to blame the cast for the problems I had with this movie, everyone does at minimum serviceable work and that shouldn't be met with vitriol. The other aspect I liked was that Amsterdam looks good, the period setting, the costuming and the feel of the 1930s is all there and well represented. This film had a surprisingly large budget and it's reflected on the on screen product.

With that praise out of the way, while Amsterdam touches on some actual events that happened in history, it's more focused on the characters and their oddball eccentricities than telling a larger story. It's very reminiscent of Russell's previous effort American Hustle (a much better but still mixed bag of a movie that also starred Christian Bale) and while it's nice that the creative team cares so much about character development, it doesn't make you forget how lazily constructed the rest of the movie is. Burt Berensdsen, Valerie Voze and Harold Woodman are all intriguing people at first glance but their motivations are surprisingly simple and they make bizarre choices (Valerie's unwillingness to reach out to Harold despite being a state over for 12 years, Burt's devotion to his wife that doesn't care about him etc.) that we barely have time to process before the movie shrugs and cuts to the next scene. Their friendship is laudable but other than their collective kindness, we don't get any insight to what they really want or what's driving them forward besides saving their own lives. The film presents their comings and goings in a very sudden way as if the characters are just trying to live in the moment and their futures hang in the balance with any given choice they make. This is fine if the movie takes place over a day but this movie spans decades and this kind of presentation doesn't gel.

What I'm going to remember from this movie above all other things is Amsterdam's reliance on constantly explaining itself through it's own dialogue. It's as if they realized the audience wouldn't be able to follow what was going on so at the beginning of every scene the characters explain what's going on and what they need to do, and then every 5-10 minutes, one of the 3 reminds the audience what they're doing and what they need to do. This happens constantly and I was in awe of either the movie's lack of confidence in it's audience or just how badly written the dialogue was. We don't need to be beaten over the head with the message or what's going on, maybe Amsterdam thinks it's being more subtle than it is? I had never experienced something like this in a movie and I repeatedly had to check with my friend that I was hearing what the actors and actresses were saying correctly. Add on top of this that the other half of the dialogue is just nonsense that barely relates to anything and I was just flabbergasted as Amsterdam just jumped from scene to scene.

Amsterdam does have a point to make once you put all of this aside and it's a point worth making and a subject worth remembering. I want to give the creative team credit for this but once again, the movie is so clumsily put together that any gravity or stakes are lost along the way. Support for Facism grew everywhere in the 1930s and it took brave men and women to root it out and destroy it but Amsterdam chooses to allude to these things for most of the movie instead of establishing those stakes until they just blurt it out at the gala and it feels like a bunch of build up to something that was pretty obvious earlier in the movie (the twist just falls flat). Its been done better in other movies and TV shows so the effort was appreciated, but I wasn't terribly impressed (check out Peaky Blinders if this interests you).

When I was describing to a friend why this movie was so uniquely terrible, I had a hard time coming up with a comparison or choosing the right words to convey what I meant. Some movies are bad in a loud or bombastic way, they get up in-your-face and refuse to let you look away. If I had to come up with a recent example, House of Gucci or Old come to mind. That's not the type of movie Amsterdam is, it's a fairly quiet and subdued movie that does it's own thing. But it's also remarkably messy, almost without an overarching story and while there's plenty of subtext and real history sprinkled in, I couldn't pay attention to any of it with how terrible the dialogue was and how scattershot the plotting is. I kept wanting to give this movie extra points because of who was involved in making it and because it wasn't a huge tentpole project from the studio. But, I also kept reminding myself that this movie wasn't accidentally awful, it was deliberately being presented this way and it just kept going... and going... and going.... until eventually I had completely lost my patience with it. David O. Russell is a talented filmmaker and he's capable of great work but this is a missed-the-board-completely kind of misfire. Amsterdam grades out as a 3/10 for me and while I didn't leave the theatre furious, I was aghast at how many talented, rich or influential people read this script and still said yes at the end of the day. I can't recommend this movie at all and your time is better spent on whatever else you'd like to do instead.