There is a very simple but unspoken rule when it comes to putting together a film – if a director is going to make the audience spend more than two hours with their work, they have to at least make it worth our while, especially if it is an original work and not one based on previously existing material. Someone who has seemingly struggled with this principle is David O. Russell, who has made a few good films, with a couple of inferior efforts scattered in between. His most recent effort is Amsterdam, his first film in nearly a decade – and considering this is the return of a director that had quite an impressive streak in the first part of the previous decade, it’s beyond disappointing to discover that this is possibly his worst film since his younger days. It is doubly bleak considering how much potential the film had – a great cast, an excellent design team and a story that could have been incredible in the right hands. Sometimes, even the most acclaimed directors don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt, and Amsterdam proves that Russell, who is certainly enough of a seasoned veteran to earn some degree of confidence, can stumble. Whether this is a result of needing to sharpen his tools after several years away from filmmaking or just a matter of him failing to put together a film worthy of our time is a matter of opinion, but e what is almost certain is that this is not a good film, a jumbled and unnecessarily complex series of moments that seemingly intend to be a whistle-stop tour of American political machinations and its social ramifications between the two wars, but comes across as unconvincing and almost unnerving in its total disregard for narrative conventions, becoming nothing more than a shrill, uninteresting attempt at a period comedy that is dull at its best moments, deeply irritating at its worst – and nothing has pointed towards Russell’s descent into mediocrity than this film, which just feels like it is wasting our time more than it is giving us something worth watching, which is not what we’d expect from a director who has done some genuinely good work in the past.

The weaponisation of whimsy has unfortunately become something of an epidemic in contemporary literature, with either the eccentricity of Tim Burton, or the twee nature of Wes Anderson occupying a very large part of the culture as the two extremes, with many artists aiming to replicate these same patterns since audiences seem to respond to them quite positively. Russell seemed to want to take a cue from them, crafting this comedy that falls victim to its peculiarities more than it benefits from them. Amsterdam is a complete tonal mess, seemingly struggling with defining itself along any clear genre boundaries, and not in the way that we’d expect from genre-bending comedies that draw from many sources of inspiration. It almost feels like Russell envisioned this film as a straightforward drama and then decided to reconfigure it as a comedy at the eleventh hour, but without actually spending time doing the necessary rewrites to change the tone and register in a way that made sense. It also doesn’t help that the film is poorly edited, with scenes jumping between different periods in a way that Russell thought was creative and energetic but rather ends up being too jagged to ever fully capture our attention. The plot itself is beyond convoluted – it’s as if Russell was trying to do a poor imitation of a Thomas Pynchon story, with the same approach to eccentric characters and a plot steeped deep in the feeling of paranoia-inducing conspiracies, but lacking the wit and creativity to even amount to a fraction of the kinds of works towards he was actively trying to pay tribute. They say that imitation is the highest form of flattery, but as evident throughout this film, it only means something if there is some sense of effort behind it, and it’s clear that Amsterdam is a soulless effort, filled with vapid characters and a plot that goes in so many different directions, it struggles to attain even the slightest bit of our attention, which is not something one would expect from what appeared to be an extremely ambitious production – sometimes audacity isn’t nearly as positive a quality as one would expect, and some directors should stay within their niche if they’re not going to put in the effort to make something that warrants all this work.

Considering how much potential it had, you’d imagine the cast would be able to salvage the film and prevent it from being a complete disaster – and when you’re working with someone who was regularly described as being “an actor’s director” (which is not untrue – Russell did bring some of the best work in many of his actors in the past), there is some degree of confidence that they will at least make it worthwhile. Unfortunately, Amsterdam is too muddled to even feature particularly good performances, despite the strength of the cast. Christian Bale reunites with Russell for the first time since their massively acclaimed collaboration on The Fighter over a decade ago, and the other two leads are played by John David Washington and Margot Robbie, very gifted actors working with the director for the first time. At a cursory glance, it seems like a promising assembling of actors, one that could not go wrong even if the rest of the production was totally botched. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case – in the same way that the film doesn’t know what it wanted to be, the actors have very little idea on how to approach the material themselves, frequently struggling to find ways to define these characters beyond the mere archetypes from which they were constructed. Russell puts too much faith into his actors to do their own research and develop the characters themselves, but when dealing with such vague traits and characteristics, they just fall into the same state of disrepair that encompasses the entire film. The sprawling supporting cast isn’t much better – many of the most gifted artists of their generation (and Taylor Swift, for some reason) show up throughout this film, and while they do their best, they are frequently the victim of a director who put too much stock into casting as many notable actors as he could, not bothering to actually define them. It’s truly pointless to have such a good cast if you simply don’t know what to do with them, which is the primary downfall of this film, which falls apart from the very first moment, with absolutely no one being given anything even vaguely interesting or worthy of their talents.

Amsterdam is a film that has many flaws, but we can excuse several of them, since they are arguably beyond the control of anyone involved, since it’s difficult to predict how a film will play with audiences, especially one as ambitious as this one. However, the film does commit the one cardinal sin for which it simply cannot be forgiven – it is truly boring, and it feels like a chore to get through all 134 minutes of this story, which keeps hinting at the fact that the eventual revelation beneath the mystery that drives the film will be both shocking and exciting, when in reality, by the time we reach the resolution, the revelation sinks like a lead balloon, ending the film on a total whimper (which isn’t helped by the forced sense of sentimentality, which is entirely misplaced in this film), and leaving us with far more questions than it seemed capable of answering. Russell normally does make films that end with a satisfying conclusion, even if it isn’t the one we expected, so the surprise here is that even he is capable of just completely fumbling a promising story, basing the entire film around a weak conspiracy that is neither interesting nor riveting. This is just a film that fails to grasp its own nature – where some may expect a decent comedic thriller with overtures of social commentary, we just get two hours of eccentric ramblings, delivered by actors that don’t even know the tone of the film they are in. There are far too many moments where it feels like Russell is pausing the film to wink at the audience, trying to force us into acknowledging his own supposed cleverness, when in reality we’ll probably feel nothing but umbrage for a director whose sense of self-indulgence is truly out of control here, making us endure his flights of fancy without even giving us the gift of a clear conclusion or even the most simple sense of satisfaction, which is just an additional shortcoming that can be added onto the layers of innate, lifeless filmmaking that we encounter throughout what comes dangerously close to being more of an ordeal than an experience.

To say that Amsterdam is a total waste of time may be too harsh, since there are a few worthwhile moments, even if they are few and far between, which is not enough to qualify it as anything but a slight failure. There is a quarter of a brilliant film somewhere deep in this story, and it does have something that resembles a worthy storyline, but it’s just embedded under layers of deeply mediocre filmmaking. These slivers of a good film only exist to make us wonder what could have been had Russell either worked more closely to develop the primary ideas (which include providing a conclusion that wasn’t rushed and had some semblance of complexity without being convoluted) or at least had the good sense to create a film with a clear identity, rather than this jumble of strange ideas and meaningless details that serve very little purpose and ultimately just fall apart in a way that makes for a profoundly dull experience that never has much meaning beyond what we see on the surface. There’s a lack of detail or precision, which was almost compulsory for a film such as this, which becomes far less effective the more we realize that there isn’t any clear conclusion that will allow everything to make sense. It’s unfortunately quite boring, and it never amounts to anything. Whether this is indicative of Russell struggling to maintain the goodwill he had developed in the past decade or just a rare stumble from a normally solid director remains to be seen – but needless to say, waiting seven years to make an entirely unconvincing film feels like an unfortunate turn of events, and single-handedly makes Amsterdam one of the more disappointing works from a major auteur in recent years.