Now a lot of people like to rail into directors when their film is seen as nothing but laundry lists of stars. I think mainly now of how of recent people seem to make a big point of contention and easy jokes about Wes Anderson’s casts, however these sorts of jokes are fun to make, but in the end don’t hold much water. I have often said that despite the fact I am a struggling actor looking for a break, I would love nothing more than to have the I watch films be filled with great known actors in every role. What is the issue there? The issue is when that’s all one can talk about with a film. With Anderson (take your pick of Wes or Paul Thomas) or Altman or Tarantino, the starried cast are always given fun characters and great dialogue to deliver, so no matter how long they are on screen their casting has an impact. Well, with David O. Russell’s latest effort (and the effort is invisible yet horridly palpable) one can’t help but feel a whole new quantity when it comes to the starry element. For instance when Robert De Niro showed up who my dad didn’t know was in it, he looked at me, with less a look of “Oh De Niro is in this!” and more so “Oh, they’ve dragged him into this too”.
Beyond giving us a great Taylor Swift gif, I very much doubt that there will be any cultural or filmic residue left by Amsterdam beyond perhaps the new entry of it being one of the great critical and commercial failures of our time. But this is not a big disaster like a Waterworld or what people thought Titanic would be where the possibility for a director biting off more than they can chew hangs over the whole affair, this is a startlingly simple story whose screenplay and direction is one that resides purely in the doling out of information that is incredibly obvious to anybody beyond the laymen and whose attempts at comedy are cringey and whose attempts at kooky originality to pepper throughout is an abysmal showcase of a lack of understanding of tone. But what on earth is the tone this film is going for in the first place? Something dry and darkly comic and mysterious, all set against a hopeful tale of veterans fighting against a system who rejects them? The elements of disabled veterans and those disfigured by the war and Christian Bale as their triumphant spokesman is where the film strikes at something interesting, but even then overall fumbles to make this anything more than an intriguing background to it’s terribly dull central plot. O. Russell as a writer here strains throughout to make an empty farce of an intrinsic plot come off as this charming and intricate narrative, only to lead to intense boredom from the sheer obviousness of the whole affair. O. Russell as a director offers little to no elevation of his shoddy screenplay and simply offers up a by the numbers visual depiction with little to no flare or even compassion for the work it seems.
Bale is brilliant as he always is, but at times here even struggles himself to overcome the films un-evenness of tone and shoddy overall lack of depth. Margot Robbie is great as she always is and may be the best performance in the film, but is stuck with this atrocious character whose a combination of kooks and kinks that never come to anything other than a bland attempt at making a character have a little bit of depth. John David Washington is uncharacteristically uncharismatic here and is actually the sort of performance that leads to a mental ‘emperors new clothes’ style conversation of whether or not Washington was any good in the first place or rather just working with material that works for him with great directors. Every performance in this film is a testament to great actors overpowering terrible work. Even the smallest of Rami Malleck and Anya Taylor-Joy turns are fun and entertaining, despite the badly drawn caricatures they are inhabiting. Chris Rock is not on normal top form but still has a few great moments. Whereas Washington really does fall flat here, leading one to perhaps unfairly wonder. Beyond our trio there are a very marketable plethora of stars, with Mike Meyers even showing up and effectively re-creating his Inglorious Basterds character and doing great entertaining work. But as already stated multiple times now, this is all in service of nothing. It’s like you have fine art on a boat that’s sinking. That metaphor was just as ill-conceived and un-funny and badly written as Amsterdam, almost.
A just plain drab 4/10. Never in my life have I been so terribly bored and un-effected by a film featuring so many great actors. O. Russell is hit and miss at the best of times, but this may be his biggest miss so far. There are enough performances to drag this by tooth and nail up to 4, but on what merit could one grant any more points to this film? Certainly not the direction with its visual blandness and its insistence on nothing but close-ups to little effect. Certainly not the script, with its empty premise and convolutions that don’t work on any level, of drama, mystery, tension or comedy. Certainly not in any regard could I give this film more than a 4. But above all else it really is just so intensely dull and boring. Revelations are flat farts and arcs are non-existent. Great actors do fine work in terrible film – there’s your logline.
P.S. I’ll leave the matter of why a film about love and kindness overcoming anger and hatred coming from David O. Russell being troublesome and fraught to another article. The film’s bad and his last few films have been bad too, this is less so a case of art versus the artist, more so an overall critical blandness over-riding all matters regarding this film and the film-maker.
- - Thomas Carruthers
1 Comments
I'm not sure I should trust a review from someone who doesn't even know the difference between "affect" and "effect".
ReplyDeleteI saw the movie and really liked it. Of all the actors, Christian Bale outshines them all, even the best. It's so obvious that he has reached the top of the game in acting performance.