[ad_1]
Amsterdam (NC16)
134 minutes, opens on Thursday
2 stars
The story: Christian Bale plays a doctor, John David Washington an attorney and Margot Robbie a nurse. The three friends are framed for a murder in 1930s New York and uncover a dastardly political conspiracy.
Amsterdam, the first feature from Hollywood film-maker David O. Russell since Joy (2015), is loosely based on the 1933 White House Putsch, a plot to overthrow the government of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and install a dictator.
But to be clear, this true-crime period comedy romance adventure with its mannered wackiness and empty caricatures is a misfire, nothing like the 2013 true-crime period caper American Hustle which scored 10 Academy Award nominations, including for writer-director Russell and his regular lead Bale.
Bale’s doctor here is a big-hearted war veteran with a glass eye. He narrates the flashback showing the threesome forging their bond and finding freedom – from racism, family, social strictures – in 1918 Europe during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in a Manhattan thick with post-war intrigue, they reunite to investigate an assassination.
Famous actors swan in and out of the narrative sprawl, each given an idiosyncrasy in place of a character – whether Michael Shannon’s and Mike Myers’ pair of Allied spies, who are avid ornithologists, or Robbie’s nurse, who alchemises shrapnel into art.
Rami Malek and Anya Taylor-Joy are a society couple. Chris Rock, Zoe Saldana, Matthias Schoenaerts and Taylor Swift are others in a crowded cast, their combined screen time less than that of Bale’s glass eye.
Only Robert De Niro plays his decorated general straight in a late welcome appearance. That is because he has to deliver the movie’s serious, timely warning about safeguarding democracy from resurgent fascism, although almost as grave a concern is the squandering of the collective acting talent.
Hot take: Do not be deceived by the starry cast. This is a misbegotten farce.
[ad_2]
Source link