Amsterdam 4K 2022 Ultra HD 2160p

The story is set in the 1930s. Three friends - a doctor, a nurse and a lawyer - unwittingly witness a murder and are instantly under suspicion. On the run, they manage to solve one of the most daring crimes of the century.

Amsterdam 4K Review
1933. The doctor Bert Behrendsen (Christian Bale) lost his eye during World War I and returned unused. Now he helps other veterans cope with their pain with the help of experimental drugs, which, however, do not always work as they should. His friend and fellow soldier Harold Woodman (John David Washington) offers him a job: he must quickly and covertly perform an autopsy on a colonel from their regiment. The thing is that the military man's daughter Liz (Taylor Swift) does not believe in the naturalness of his death. She believes that her father was poisoned.

Heroes quickly find confirmation of this. That's just immediately on their trail go mysterious men in black, and the police are looking for a murder they did not commit. Only Valerie (Margot Robbie) can help them - a girl Bert and Harold have known since the war. Together they start to unravel a plot of national importance: there is a place for secret organizations, the CIA and the MI6, and even an old soldier with the face of Robert De Niro.

After a seven-year break, David O. Russell, the author of "The Fighter", "American Swindle" and "My Boyfriend is Crazy", returned to the big movie. So much so, it seems, that after the premiere of "Amsterdam" he won't shoot as much more - at best. And it's not just the fact that the actors recalled his cannibalistic methods on the set: Amy Adams said, for example, how Russell purposely brought her to tears. But also for the banal reason that he made a movie catastrophically bad. Not "passable", not "average", not just below the level of what he had done before. It's so nightmarish that it's hard to believe anyone could have made it other than as a joke.

"Amsterdam" collected all the superficial tricks and details that somewhere back in the noughties, someone could probably associate with daring "cool" cinema. The non-linear narration, the credits with the characters' names as they appear, the freeze frames with the narrator's sneering voice. In one of the first scenes, the hero stops the narration and declares something like, "You're wondering how I got here? Well, let me tell you." And within the framework of the film, it's not even a joke on an established cliché, but just a blind exploitation of it. It's as if David O. Russell missed not seven years, but at least thirty-seven. And now he considers cutting-edge techniques that even the most devoted fans of the ironic postmodern have had time to tire of.

The problem, of course, is not the tools per se. Whatever screenwriting guru Robert Mackie writes in his books, even a mossy screenplay can be used creatively - think of Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation. But this is not the case with "Amsterdam. Here the characters with enviable regularity tell behind-the-scenes about what is happening on the screen at exactly the same moment. They recall in dialogues the events shown two scenes earlier. They send the viewer into confusing flashbacks to show exactly nothing new regarding the main story. Such total indifference to narrative clarity is to be expected from a short film by a particularly audacious third-year student at VGIK, but not from a director with five Oscar nominations.

Obviously, there's an authorial intent here. No matter how you feel about David O. Russell as an author or person, it's hard to deny that in past films he has in one way or another strived for psychological accuracy. "Amsterdam," on the other hand, is pure abstraction. An absurdist drawing with broad strokes from a man who is generally used to writing realistic domestic subjects. The film is purposely so silly, awkward and superficial. And the actors of the first magnitude in it are specially played as in a school theater (but only here in the background of Christian Bale can normally look Taylor Swift). Only Russell can answer why, but one can assume that the director is very much trying to create the same deliberate "man-made" screen world that Wes Anderson has, for example. In his films, too, people don't act like people, and the most frontal and foppish narrative tricks are woven into the story. Anderson wants the viewer to know that he has a movie in front of him, that there are visible imprints of human hands in this world. And Russell, in "Amsterdam," seems to be aiming for something similar.

Except that in his case, the handiwork is not organic to the world, but rather forced. Anderson's deliberately "artificial" stories unfold in an equally artificial puppet world, visually constructed by the director's recognizable hand, packed into smooth geometric shapes. "Amsterdam" simplifies the world visually, too, but rather in a bad way. The entire film is the conversations of several characters in a half-empty interior. Close-up - general - medium, joke - glue - flashback. New York differs from Amsterdam only in the color of the wallpaper, and when each new character appears (he or she is necessarily played here by an insanely famous actor or actress) the camera is uncomfortably long stuck on his or her face, so that all the audience will definitely have time to gasp at the recognition of their favorite artist.

Stylistically, and script-wise, the film looks like a poor theatrical play: only the scenery changes, and the characters keep lazily exchanging what appear to be funny lines. Here it is worth reminding that the film was actually directed by Emmanuel Lubetsky - also, by the way, after a seven-year break from big cinema. True, you can understand it only at the credits.