Metacritic reviews

It’s an audacious odyssey that buckles under the weight of all its ornate and flights of quirky fancy. But if you’re a cynical optimist that’s disgusted with the rise of despotism, absolutism, rancid lies, revolting white supremacist beliefs but still wants to believe in humanity, hope, and the goodness of people, it might just strike a major chord.

Amsterdam is not a great movie by any shakes, although it looks terrific and all of the performances . . . are energetic, entertaining, and enjoyable.

David O. Russell’s Amsterdam is a lot of movies inelegantly squidged into one — a zany screwball comedy, a crime thriller, an earnest salute to pacts of love and friendship, an antifascist history lesson with fictional flourishes. Those competing strands all have their merits, bolstered by entertaining character work from an uncommonly high-wattage ensemble

The result has all the red flags of a flop, but takes a strong enough anti-establishment stand — and does so with wit and originality — to earn a cult following. There’s too much ambition here to write the movie off, even if Amsterdam, like the history it depicts, winds up taking years to be rediscovered and understood.

There is something weirdly heavy and foggy in Amsterdam that feels like it’s working against the lightness and nimbleness needed for a caper. It’s the reality of the history, which the movie makes explicit in the closing credits.

Russell’s film is not remotely playable. Amsterdam so badly wants to be a light romp with heavy-duty meaning that it cannot help but be flattened by a sagging self-exhaustion. It is an exercise in interminable madcappery.

Although stuffed with ambition and the occasionally arresting moment, this 1930s mystery flaunts a freewheeling spirit that far outpaces its convoluted story and dramatically thin protagonists.

A star-studded new historical comedy that’s amusing at best, noxious at worst, and frantically self-insistent upon its own negligible entertainment value at all times as it strains to find the beauty in the mad tapestry of life? That’s right: David O. Russell is back.

Amsterdam might encompass 15 years of history, straddle two continents and throw in innumerable subplots, but it becomes increasingly hard to shake the sense that you’re watching a very thin idea twiddling its thumbs.

Russell’s brand of Sturges-inspired madcappery has always been a high-wire act of energy and tone, but Amsterdam doesn’t even feel like an “I Heart Huckabees” or “Joy” misfire. It’s sloppy and disconnected, crammed with thinly drawn characters play-acting ‘30s screwball as Russell’s unmoored camera and jarring editing force the issue instead of capturing something genuine which, even with a game cast, clearly wasn’t there to begin with.