Amsterdam (2022)

Title: Amsterdam

Year: 2022

Genre: Comedy | Drama | History |

Runtime: 134  min

Director: David O. Russell

Starring: Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, Robert De Niro

6.2/10

Amsterdam is crowded with established actors with salaries enough to buy a country or a private island. It’s crowded because there are so many characters to keep track of. A character that doesn’t mean much for the story but is still a crucial part of certain scenes. Even if we’ve Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, Rami Malek, Anya Taylor-Joy, Robert De Niro, Michael Shannon, Mike Myers, Chris Rock, and John David Washington to name a few. Each actor has an important part to play per se, but it’s never explained what the conspiracy is until the end. That’s kept in the dark and somehow is the business plot, the coup d’état from 1933, embedded in the story in some way. How its connection with these characters seems way far-fetched and with everything that comes to pass in the plot, it seems like an imaginary way, a wet fantasy for a director such as David O. Russell.

The directing is not the film’s best part. The dialogue comes off as unnatural and doesn’t uphold the actor in the appropriate way. Although, De Niro is one that gives a lasting effort to the job and still makes it sound watchable. For a director who made Silver Linings Playbook and The Fighter, this film doesn’t come close to mesmerizing with his effort, money, and stardom attached to the project. The script is weak, the plot is confusing and the main character is tediously boring and annoying. This could be one of Bale’s worse performances together with Gorr in Thor: Love and Thunder. 

The best part is the clear visionary and all the actors saying lines they don’t care about. There is no effort or emotions behind the delivery. By the end with credits, as you have longed for an ending for it, it’s a beautiful shot, good acting but fails with an information dump. The film spends more time explaining everything and monologue than achieving it in a visual presentation. It’s a very long-dragging tale of something that could’ve been far more efficient. If 20th Century Studios sold the film as a coup d’état in the 1930s, it would be far more entertaining and thus skipping all thus over-reaching plot points that don’t get explained nor answered.