Amsterdam review: David O. Russell's muddled comedy is all stars and shenanigans

There are no small actors in Amsterdam, just a blizzard of stars and wham-bam cameos — Chris Rock, Mike Myers, Taylor Swift — dancing as fast as they can to the beat of David O. Russell's strained, hectic, and often inscrutable caper (in theaters Oct. 7). It's impossible to say whether the movie, based on a real-life plot to overthrow the U.S. government, is meant to be a comedy, a murder mystery, or maybe even a thwarted musical; more than once, the characters on screen do break into song. But it feels like a lot of fanfare and celebrity flop sweat to invest in the film's minimal returns, and a peculiar swerve for Russell after a seven-year absence from the screen. (Following the full-court blitz of The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, and American Hustle, his last project was the deceptively-named Jennifer Lawrence home-shopping biopic Joy, in 2015.)

It's early-1930s Manhattan, more or less, and best friends Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and Harold Woodsman (John David Washington) still bear the marks of their time together in the trenches of WWI — Burt, with his glass eye and back full of shrapnel scars, Harold with a deep gash across his otherwise unblemished jawline. One day a damsel in distress (Swift) bursts into Burt's office, insisting that the recent death of her war-hero father, Senator Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr.), did not come by natural causes, and that only this motley duo, both former soldiers under his command, can crack the case. Not that either of them are P.I.s: Burt's a nebbishy doctor whose origins and outer-borough accent belie his Park Avenue address — he's there by marriage to a high-strung debutante (Andrea Riseborough) from whom he's already estranged — and Harold is an attorney whose degree from Columbia Law doesn't tend to mean much when a beat cop sees the color of his skin.

Merie Weismiller Wallace, SMPSP/20th Century Studios

But they're both doing their best — with the help of a sympathetic friend in the coroner's office (Zoe Saldaña) and Harold's less-than-enthused legal associate (Rock) — to track down the root of what turns out to be a vast conspiracy, when they themselves becomes suspects. With two not particularly bright NYPD detectives (Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola) in pursuit, the pair makes their way to the country home of a well-connected aristocrat named Tom Voze (Rami Malek) and his blonde-whippet wife, Libby (Anya Taylor-Joy), hoping they might hold a clue. There's another surprise waiting for them there: Tom's sister, Valerie (Margot Robbie), once a combat nurse and undercover bohemian, now an involuntary shut-in on this vast estate. Back on the battlefields of Europe, she was Burt and Harold's favorite coconspirator, and also Harold's lover; together, they had a wild run in post-war Amsterdam before the social and economic realities of life brought their dreamy Dutch idyll to an end.

The reunion of their little gang is the movie's obligatory cue for high jinks, and they do ensue, through several elaborate set pieces that involve another decorated General (Robert De Niro, who barely seems to bother with his line readings), and multiple flashbacks to the good old times. Bale, his eyes maniacally wide and hair mildly electrified, feels like a nervy ancestor to Irving Rosenfeld, the swaggering con-man he played in American Hustle. He's too good an actor not to make his bow-tied agitator Burt entertain, and Washington brings a suave, soulful counterbalance. Myers and Michael Shannon are suitably surreal as a pair of eccentric intelligence agents chewing their little bits of scenery into a fine pulp, and there's an unexpected pleasure in hearing Malek delightedly roll the words "graham cracker" across his tongue. The production and costume design are, unsurprisingly, impeccable. But the resolution of the central mystery is both rushed and obtuse, and it all unfolds in a frenetic, flailing whirl of pomp and nonsense that Amsterdam's strange circuitous journey and almost embarrassing surplus of stars never quite justifies: a whirring music-box curiosity in search of some elusive purpose, and a point. Grade: C+

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