Amsterdam: A Review – Fascists, Coups and Assassinations...Oh My!
/****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****
My Rating: 1/2 out of 5 stars
My Recommendation: SKIP IT. Awful. Awful. Awful. Just an amateurish, dreadful, no-good piece of moviemaking. Go read Smedley Butler’s “War is a Racket” instead.
Amsterdam, written and directed by five-time Oscar nominee David O. Russell and starring Christian Bale, Margot Robbie and John David Washington, hit theatres with a resounding thud back in October, and is now streaming on HBO Max…and I just had the great displeasure of watching it.
The film, which describes itself as a “period comedy thriller” but feels more like a comedy thriller on its period, follows the travails of three old friends who met in World War I, Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale), Valeria Bandenberg (Margot Robbie) and Harold Woodman (John David Washington), as they uncover a coup plot in America in the 1930’s and try to thwart it.
The coup plot in the film is based on the real-life 1933 Business Plot, where American oligarchs, like JP Morgan, Irenee DuPont, Prescott Bush – banker and future father and grandfather to two U.S. presidents, Robert Singer Clark – heir to the Singer Corporation fortune, and banker Robert Clark among many others, plotted to overthrow President Roosevelt and install a fascist military dictatorship here in America.
The real-life Business Plot was thwarted by General Smedley Butler (in the film the character is named Gil Dillenbeck and is portrayed by Robert DeNiro), one of America’s greatest but least known heroes, but was successfully covered up, disparaged and then memory-holed by the powers that be who control the media.
In real-life the Business Plot’s failure was only temporary though because in the long term it’s been a smashing success. Over the years the “Business Plot” simply morphed into other forms and used other tactics to find success.
The most obvious was when, thirty years after the Business Plot was thwarted, President John F. Kennedy, who had promised to “splinter the CIA in a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind”, got his brains splintered into a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind in Dealey Plaza by the the oligarch’s intelligence/muscle division - the CIA…oops, I mean by a “lone nut” (wink-wink)…all because Kennedy wasn’t going to make the villainous vampire class gobs of money by greenlighting the war in Vietnam, among a myriad of other reasons.
Prescott Bush (who, along with many of his Business Plot co-conspirators, supported the Nazis before and during World War II) had a son, George HW Bush – who later become the Director of the CIA, as well as Vice President and eventually President, he earned his stripes by being an integral part of the plot against JFK.
Nearly twenty years later in 1981, George HW Bush was Vice President to Ronald Reagan when The Gipper had the great misfortune of getting shot just months after his inauguration by…you guessed it…another “lone nut” (wink-wink), this one named John Hinckley.
If Reagan had died Bush would’ve inherit the throne – and would have been eligible to be president for nearly 12 years (nearly three full terms) since Reagan had just started his presidency…which makes the fact that the Bush family had deep connections to John Hinckley’s family, so deep in fact that Scott Hinckley (John Hinckley’s brother) was scheduled to have dinner at Neil Bush’s (HW Bush’s son) home the week of the assassination attempt, a very uncomfortable “coincidence” (wink-wink).
Since the assassination/execution of JFK, we’ve had a succession of fascist monsters from both political parties occupying the White House and ruling the land, most notably, but not exclusively, the aforementioned George HW Bush, as well as his diabolical son George W. Bush.
George W. Bush, you may recall, was president when 9/11 occurred and the War on Terror and War in Iraq were launched and ultimately failed, the torture and surveillance regime became mainstream, and the big money interests raped and pillaged America and gutted the working class…again…and then got “bailed out” by their cronies.
9/11 is another of those unfortunate Bush family coincidences (wink-wink), because on the morning of the attack George W. Bush, former President and father of the then current President, was at the D.C. Ritz-Carlton as a representative for the Carlyle Group meeting with the brother of Osama bin Laden – the CIA asset the CIA claimed perpetrated the 9/11 attack, sort of like how CIA asset Lee Harvey Oswald committed the JFK assassination. I’d wink again but I’m fresh out of winks.
As much as I’d like to ignore the abominable cinematic calamity of Amsterdam and dive deep into the rabbit hole and talk about the machinations of the wicked witches and warlocks ruling this country, I simply must, for the moment, return to this shit sandwich of a movie.
I suppose it is to Amsterdam’s credit that it even dares to bring up the Business Plot, something of which most people are completely unaware, but the movie is so cinematically repulsive and artistically repugnant that one must seriously consider that it’s an intentional piece of counter-intelligence propaganda meant to trigger audience revulsion at the mere mention of the Business Plot because it’s connected with this odious movie.
David O. Russell has always been an abysmal filmmaker, but Amsterdam is such a poorly made and dreadfully written, directed and acted film that it’s like Russell’s shitty filmmaking machine went into hyper-drive. The notion that Russell intentionally scuttled the production by imposing an astounding level of his fecal filmmaking flair in order to…I don’t know… appease some higher ups in the ruling class food chain in the hopes that his recent “troubles” – which include sexually harassing his transgender teenage niece/nephew, becomes less insane than it obviously sounds.
Whatever the reason, Amsterdam is sufficiently heinous enough that the Business Plot now has zero chance of becoming well-known amongst the piss-ants, proles and plebes of the general population.
Amsterdam has rightfully, and in my case righteously, been savaged by critics and lost nearly a $100 million at the box office, so congrats David O. Russell and your oligarchical overlords, your secret is safe as no studio executive will touch a Business Plot movie for at least the next 1,000 years, then it’ll be the problem of the next Reich, which by my calculations will be the Fifth, to put the fix in.
From a cinematic perspective, Amsterdam’s failure is no fluke as the script is an incomprehensible abomination that features a plot that’s so convoluted and so tonally incoherent as to be egregiously abrasive.
Russell’s amateurish, heavy-handed and heinous direction is laughable, if not criminal. The reality is that Russell has always been a cinematic charlatan. Always. His movies, like The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle, have generated some broad-based appeal but they have been, for the most part, vacuous, vapid and venal piles of shit.
Russell’s movie Three Kings was his most interesting but…that’s not saying much. And just a reminder, Three Kings, which was about the first Gulf War, wasn’t an anti-war film at all but was actually advocating for MORE war…and magically the war it hoped for came to be a few years later in the wake of 9-11. Yay!
Russell makes the bizarre choice in Amsterdam to shoot a bevy of scenes where the characters are talking directly to the camera while in conversation with each other. This is so absurd as to be distracting, if not maddening. These conversations are sometimes between three or four people, and no one’s eye line matches, so it’s like Russell is cutting between characters talking in opposite directions. I get why he did it – Russell is playing the Hollywood political card and having the characters talk directly to us because they’re not-so-subtly warning us about the peril facing our democracy right now because of Trump…blah blah blah…but this sort of myopic Rachel Maddow-inspired nonsense ignores the fact that our democracy died a long, long time ago…also it’s so cinematically disjointed and disordered as to be catastrophic.
Russell’s continued focus on eyes in Amsterdam, whether they be Mike Myers weird blue ones, or Ed Begley Jr’s unblinking ones, or Christian Bale’s glass one, or the eyes of the actors speaking directly into the camera during scenes, is inanely ham-handed. Look (“see” what I did there?), we get it…the brave artist David O. Russell is trying to use his egregiously shitty movie to get us to see the Truth of our own world – but it’s so poorly done and so politically vacant it made me roll my eyes so far in the back of my head I nearly had a seizure.
As for the all-star cast…hoo-boy.
Christian Bale is a good actor and he does his best here but goodness gracious it’s like watching a man piss into hurricane-force winds and wonder why he gets wet. Bale’s Dr. Burt Berendson has a glass eye…reminiscent of the actor’s role in The Big Short…a far-superior film that should be connected to Amsterdam due to the sub-text and text of corrupt elites rigging the system but Amsterdam sucks so bad that connection is completely lost.
Margot Robbie, who plays nurse Valerie Vandenberg, is a luminous beauty, but her old timey New Yawk accent which she seems to fall back into in nearly every role, has become extremely tiresome. Robbie is a big movie star but the more you see her the less you think of her.
John David Washington, who I thought was so good in BlacKKKlansman, is so bad in this movie, and in his last bunch of movies, I can confidently declare he must have had quadruple charisma bypass surgery. Washington is simply dead behind the eyes and brings nothing to this role, so much so I could swear I hear a sucking sound every time he’s on screen.
Rami Malek has a supporting role and confirms what has become very apparent in recent years…Rami Malek is officially an awful actor. Chris Rock too has a supporting role that would have been better served if it never existed, and Taylor Swift has a supporting role and is remarkably successful in proving she’s not an actress. Good for you Taylor!
The bottom line is that the Business Plot is an important piece of history that has successfully been banished from our collective consciousness, and Amsterdam is such a God-awful, disaster of a movie that this crucial, treasonous event will only be further flushed down the memory hole and forever forgotten. Which is a shame since people should be aware that we live in a fascist, corporate hellscape ruled by cruel, vicious, blood-thirsty oligarchs just like the ones who tried to overthrow FDR, and who very successfully overthrew JFK.
This begs the question, where’s our Smedley Butler? And where’s the great Smedley Butler bio-pic or prestige TV series we so desperately need?
I’ll tell you where they are…they’re strangled in the crib by the ruthless ruling elites who use their lap dog media to stifle the truth of their tyranny and treason, ensuring it never sees the light of day and even if it did it would never be believed by the misinformed masses.
In conclusion, in case you haven’t figured it out yet, I hated Amsterdam and implore you not to waste your time watching. The truth is I watched it so you don’t have to…and boy oh boy…you really don’t have to.
Follow me on Twitter: Michael McCaffrey @MPMActingCo
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