Amulet

Amulet

This film is both too much and not enough at the same time. It’s all over the place, it doesn’t know where it wants to go or how to get there.

Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, John David Washington, Robert De Niro, Anya Taylor-Joy, Rami Malek, Chris Rock, Michael Shannon, Zoe Saldana and Alessandro Nivola just some of the big names that signed on for this thing. How do you assemble that cast and mess up so spectacularly? I literally would have rather watched them sit in a room and talk to each other for two plus hours or say nothing at all than whatever this is supposed to be. But no: David O. Russell has come up with endless adventures and detours and wacky hijinks and elaborate asides for his actors that aren’t nearly as clever or charming as he thinks they are.

“Amsterdam” had me asking myself again and again: What is this movie about? Where are we going with this? And having to stop myself to figure out: What just happened? And not in a good way like “Memento” or “Cats.” No. It’s all gibberish until it grinds to a halt and makes several of its stars give speeches about things David O. Russell couldn’t be bothered to spend the previous two hours articulating himself. Then it ends with some interminable treacly narration about love and kindness over images of bohemian rhapsody we saw like 15 minutes ago.

With any of the writer/director’s films (especially lately), anything could happen next; watching one of his movies you don’t feel safe predicting anything because you honestly have no idea what he’ll do next which is why his camerawork tends to be so alive, his tonal swings so ambitious yet cohesive! Not here though. Because “Amsterdam” doesn’t have the compelling visual language of something like “Three Kings” or “American Hustle,” and it doesn’t have characters like the ones in “The Fighter” or “Silver Linings Playbook,” who are so vibrant with heart-on-their-sleeve humanity you can’t help but care about them.

None of these people feel like real people despite the fact that they’re all played by prodigiously talented actors; they are collections of affectations, some more interesting than others.

So here’s what happens in this movie: Burt Berendsen (Bale) and Harold Woodman (Washington) have been best friends since they were kids he’s a folksy doctor with a glass eye that keeps falling out when he gets hooked on his own homemade pain meds, which make him collapse to the ground causing his eye to fall out; he is doing intense shtick throughout, I promise you and served together in the same racially mixed Army battalion during WWI. Now Harold is an attorney and Burt is a kind of weird failed novelist or something. When their beloved General Graves (De Niro, wasted) dies under suspicious circumstances, his daughter (Taylor Swift) asks them to investigate.

But fast, they are running away, and it makes them remember how they met. In fact, this is the funniest part of the movie. He fills all their post-war years in Amsterdam with Valerie Voze (Robbie), a nurse who took care of them when they were sick and who was their partner in crime for all sorts of drunken shenanigans.

Russell is working hard; Emmanuel Lubezki, the celebrated cinematographer (a multiple Oscar winner for his work with Alfonso Cuaron on “Gravity” and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu on “Birdman,” “The Revenant”), even pulls back on the sepia tones that too often feel like suffocation, an attempt at capturing nostalgia. Those Amsterdam sequences have life and joy that are missing everywhere else. This time she’s a brunette and looks impossibly radiant but she’s also a Manic Pixie Dream Girl, a secretly rich heiress who turns bullet fragments into art as a metaphor for her healing presence in Burt and Harold’s lives.

That’s what makes “Amsterdam” so frustrating: It will have a scene or an interaction or a performance here or there that is genuinely entertaining and maybe even comes close to landing whatever mark Russell is trying to hit. The film could have been built around any number of duos or subplots along the way that would have been more interesting than what we got: Malek and Taylor-Joy as her snobby, striving brother and sister in law are a delightfully odd couple; Nivola and Matthias Schoenaerts as mismatched cops who hate each other infuse their characters with enough personality quirks and motivations beyond what’s written in the script to be amusing Shannon is good for one goofy laugh after another as Myers’ supremely self-serious spy boss.

But all these fleeting pleasures are ultimately overwhelmed by how convoluted and tedious “Amsterdam” becomes. It’s maddeningly overstuffed with incident, burdened by its overlong running time and self-importance, which is only heightened by the awards hopeful Christmas release (when it might be better to just let a movie like this quietly disappear).

The simple need for human decency a core message that’s conveyed through the presence of Robbie’s character, who is literally angelic feels like an afterthought in a film this complicated and dull. And whispering the word “Amsterdam” throughout, as several characters do, doesn’t even begin to cast the magic spell it thinks it does.

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