Ben Oliver

Now
Banner image for Amsterdam

Amsterdam

My back is killing me.
19 February 2023

Three friends (Christian Bale, John David Washington, Margot Robbie) are framed for a murder in 1930s New York. While getting to the bottom of it they uncover a crazy conspiracy.

Features an all-star cast including Chris Rock, Andrea Riseborough, Anya Taylor-Joy, Mike Myers, Michael Shannon, Taylor Swift, Rami Malek, Robert De Niro and loads more I can’t be arsed typing out because the film is quite bad.

There’s something weird in how this was made and put together I can’t quite nail down - something just off in the edit perhaps - that makes the whole film feel like they just used one take and moved on. On a line-by-line level the pacing is strange and inconsistent.

Technical flaws aside, this is still quite a bland and unexciting mess of a film. It recklessly jumps around between characters and scenes at breakneck speed, trying to move the plot onwards yet somehow feeling like it’s never going to end.

Whatever they set out to make simply did not work here.