From the release of its first official trailer to its opening weekend a few months later, director David O. Russell’s ridiculously star-studded film, Amsterdam, went from one of the most anticipated projects of 2022 to the biggest box office bomb of the year. With losses at nearly $100 million, Amsterdam is a serious runner-up for one of Hollywood’s biggest bombs of all time. And it wasn’t just general audiences that abandoned David O. Russell’s film in its opening weekend.

Critics charged Amsterdam with having a convoluted narrative that featured far too many characters and subplots for a two-hour film. And they weren’t kidding. David O. Russell is a director who has built his entire career by putting nearly all of his focus on the larger-than-life characters that populate his films, to the tune of several Oscar nominations and a couple of wins for Christian Bale and Melissa Leo in his 2010 film The Fighter.

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Like Quentin Tarantino, Russell is something of an “Oscar Whisperer.” He has a pretty good batting average for his casts; it feels like every other film of his gets Oscar nominations for half of its cast, from American Hustle to Silver Linings Playbook. But on the flip side of Russell’s unquestionable strength as an actor’s director lies perhaps his greatest weakness as a storyteller: plot, or more specifically, ensuring that audiences can follow the plots of his films. Even with an appetite for character development as large as his, Russell bit off more than he could chew with Amsterdam.

David O. Russell Wrote Too Long a Flashback For a Two-Hour Project

     20th Century Studios

Amsterdam opens with a title which reads, “A Lot of This Actually Happened.” This is a nod to Russell’s opening title in American Hustle which reads, “Some of this actually happened,” in reference to the Abscam FBI sting operation which that film is loosely based on.

Amsterdam, in turn, is loosely based on the “Business Plot of 1933,” a real-life conspiracy to overthrow FDR’s presidency and install a dictator into the White House like Mussolini in Italy. So, where does the Belgian city of Amsterdam fit into all of this? The short answer is that it really doesn’t, but let’s get into the long answer.

The film derives its title from a World War I flashback. The sequence is so long that it becomes a film-within-a-film wherein our heroes, Dr. Burt Berendsen (played by Christian Bale) and Harold Woodsman (a delightful John David Washington), are stitched up by a combat nurse Valerie Vose (played by Margot Robbie) after sustaining injuries on the battlefield in France. Harold and Valerie fall in love at first sight. The moment Burt and Harold are healed up, they run off with Valerie to Amsterdam, where the three form an intimate bond as a trio. They live together, laugh together, and even sing together.

(If the trio do anything else together, anything of an explicit nature, the audience doesn’t know for sure. If they do, Russell doesn’t show it. But he did admit in a Q&A at the DGA that this section is his homage to Francois Truffaut’s 1962 French New Wave masterpiece Jules and Jim, which also concerns a love triangle in WWI-era France.)

Amsterdam Has Too Many Characters and Subplots

Inevitably, the trio dissolves after Burt returns home to his wife’s aristocratic family in New York City. These lovely folks are the ones who shipped him off to war in the first place, hoping that Burt would die in battle. (In-laws, right?) Luckily, Burt doesn’t die, but he does lose an eye. His face is disfigured and every day of his life is filled with pain. Every day he has to climb into a horrifying bear trap of a back brace because, as the doctor character from Forrest Gump might say, “His back’s as crooked as a politician."

Years after the trio’s time in Amsterdam, Burt has allowed his New York medical practice to descend into its own little Skid Row, testing drugs on himself and other veterans in a never-ending search for painkillers that have not been invented yet.

Meanwhile, Harold is also back in New York after Valerie skipped out on him back in Amsterdam, not long after Burt. Then, one night on the streets of New York, Burt and Harold are framed for a mysterious murder of one Elizabeth Meekins (played by Taylor Swift). Elizabeth is the daughter of a US Senator, Bill Meekins (Ed Begley Jr. in a cameo as a corpse), whose own death kicks off the beginning of the film. For who should have performed Senator Bill Meekins’ autopsy but our hero, Dr. Burt Berendsen?

Soon after, Burt and Harold bump into Valerie again. The now-reunited Amsterdam trio head off on a perilous quest through the underbelly of New York City’s upper class to clear their names, solve the mysterious murder, and thwart an attempted presidential coup devised by a conspiracy of would-be robber barons who have been using a veteran’s organization as their political puppets… Confused yet?

Wait until you meet a pair of glass eye manufactures, Paul Canterbury and Henry Norcross (played by Mike Myers and Michael Shannon), who supply Burt with his Columbo-like glass eye. Also, the two are spies. Also also, they have somehow managed to predict World War II decades before Hitler was to invade Poland. Believe it or not, the subplots don’t stop with these two, and there are many more quirky characters to meet in the film.

Amsterdam is Crammed With Exposition

     20th Century Studios 

The problem is not that Amsterdam has a bad story, even if it is a really bizarre one, or that it has bad characters. No, the problem is that Amsterdam has too many stories. Too many episodes. Too many characters. The only character that seems to be missing is Basil Exposition, the satirical character Mike Myers created in the Austin Powers trilogy.

If Russell were to take a page out of Quentin Tarantino’s book and write a novelization of his own film, then that Amsterdam novelization would run at least 500 pages. Instead, Russell crammed his film with wall-to-wall exposition that is needlessly taxing on viewers, and not just in service of the plot.

Whenever a character isn’t busy explaining the plot point-blank through a voiceover or speaking directly to the camera, they’re swapping backstories among each another. The exposition is so overwhelming it leaves the viewer to wonder if the film’s cast were engaged in a quirky character contest. (If so, Bale won.)

Amsterdam is Perfectly-Suited For a Miniseries

The aforementioned qualities of Amsterdam aren’t necessarily bad things; it’s simply too much weight for a film of its runtime to bear. Though it was clearly not for lack of trying, Russell could not fit all those characters, episodes, and subplots into a single film with a runtime of two hours and 15 minutes. However, they would all have plenty of room to breathe with the lofty runtime of a miniseries.

Let’s perform a quick autopsy on Amsterdam and take a look at how easily it could have been broken down into episodes:

  • Burt’s in-laws ship him off to Europe fight in the war. Burt and Harold meet and are wounded on the battlefield. Valerie stitches up Burt and Harold, and they form a trio. The trio run off to Amsterdam and live happily until Burt leaves. Burt returns to New York and turns his medical practice into Skid Row in the search for pain medicine. Burt and Harold narrowly escape the law after being framed for the mysterious murder. The trio reunite and uncover the conspiracy. The trio meet The General, and together they plot against the conspiracy. The General foils the conspiracy with his speech and the trio save him from an assassination attempt.

It turns out that the plot of Amsterdam can fit pretty neatly into a nine-episode arc, a fairly standard length for a miniseries or a season of television. If David O. Russell would only have made the jump to television, his epic story could have taken the time it needed to satisfy viewers and critics alike.