![]() This is actually the most entertaining part of the film. When their beloved general dies suspiciously, his daughter (a distractingly stiff Taylor Swift) asks them to investigate.īut soon, they’re on the run, inspiring a flashback to how they met in the first place. Washington’s Harold Woodman served with him in the same racially mixed Army battalion in France during WWI he’s now an attorney, and the more levelheaded of the two. Bale is doing intense shtick throughout he is committed to the bit. He’s hooked on his own homemade pain meds, which cause him to collapse to the ground-which also causes his eye to fall out. But first, whimsy.īale’s Burt Berendsen is a folksy doctor with a glass eye that keeps falling out. Ultimately, he hammers us over the head with this point. Russell’s script jumps around in time from 1933 New York to 1918 Amsterdam and back again, but he’s using this time frame-and the fascist ideologies that rose to prominence then-to make a statement about what’s been going on the past several years in right-wing American politics. While trying to uncover the truth about what’s going on, they stumble upon an even larger and more sinister plot. To put it in the simplest terms possible, Bale and Washington play longtime best friends suspected of a murder they didn’t commit. Each is a collection of idiosyncrasies, some more intriguing than others. Because “Amsterdam” lacks the compelling visual language of “ Three Kings” or “ American Hustle,” for instance, and it lacks characters with heart-on-their-sleeve humanity like he shows us in “ The Fighter” or “ Silver Linings Playbook.” Despite the prodigious talent on display here, not a single figure on screen feels like a real person. He typically employs such verve in his camerawork and takes such ambitious tonal swings that you wonder in amazement how he manages to keep it all cohesive and intact. The grand finale gives us some interminable, treacly narration, explaining the importance of love and kindness over the film's images of bohemian rhapsody we’d just seen not too long ago.Īs is the case in so many of the writer/director’s other movies, we have the sensation as we’re watching that anything could happen at any moment. Over and over again, I asked myself as I was watching “Amsterdam”: What is this movie about? Where are we going with this? I’d have to stop and find my bearings: What exactly is happening now? And not in a thrilling, stimulating way, as in “ Memento,” for example, or “ Cats.” It’s all a dizzying piffle-until it stops dead in its tracks and forces several of its stars to make lengthy speeches elucidating the points Russell himself did not make over the previous two rambling hours. ![]()
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