• 20th Century Studios

In general, life is more chaotic than the order imposed on it by cinematic stories, but apparently nobody bothered to tell David O. Russell that. Over his nearly-30-year career as a writer/director, Russell has made mania and tumult an artistic theme, a defining aesthetic and—if one is to believe numerous reports over the years—part of his off-screen behavior. We've come to expect tonal craziness in his movies like Flirting With Disaster and Silver Linings Playbook as features rather than bugs, and you either roll with it, or you don't.

With all that as preface, there's still something inexplicably off about Amsterdam. Using the bare bones of a real-life story, Russell has constructed a mix of conspiracy thriller, slapstick comedy, earnest character drama and political soapbox that feels almost aggressive in its unwillingness to give the audience anything to latch on to. From one scene to the next, it's impossible to figure out how the hell you should be reacting to anything.

The tale opens in 1933 New York, where Great War veteran Bert Berendsen (Christian Bale) is a doctor working on experimental pain remedies and cosmetic surgeries for his fellow veterans. His old army buddy, attorney Harold Woodman (John David Washington) approaches him about conducting an autopsy requested by Liz Meekins (Taylor Swift), the daughter of their beloved former commanding officer; she suspects foul playin her father's death. It becomes clear that Bert and Harold are sniffing too close to something unsavory when they're framed for a murder—and their attempt to clear their names reconnects them with Valerie (Margot Robbie), the expatriate nurse both men knew after the war while still in Europe.

Before diving head-first into the mystery behind Bert and Harold's framing, Amsterdam flashes back to 1918, introducing us both to the all-Black regiment where they met, and the post-war period where they connected with Valerie. It's a chance for Russell to set up some awkward prodding at the injustice heaped on Black soldiers who fought for the country that still treated them like garbage, while also presenting Valerie as a strange soul who turns the shrapnel she recovers from soldiers' bodies into art works. It doesn't take long for Amsterdam to begin its defining tug-of-war: It's going to deal with matters like racism, the treatment of veterans and the influence exerted by monied interests in America, but it's going to do so in the kookiest manner possible.

There's nothing inherently wrong with an artist serving up the medicine of hard subjects with a spoonful of sugar, of course; it's simply that Russell demonstrates no ability in Amsterdam to meld those two things rather than have them slam repeatedly into one another. That dynamic is on display nowhere more clearly than in the radically different performances given by Washington and Bale as characters who are almost always sharing the same scenes and situations. Washington approaches every moment with absolute seriousness, evoking the coiled intensity of an educated, professional man perpetually waiting for the next slight based on his color. And Bale seems to have prepared by watching Brad Pitt's performance in Burn After Reading, turning Bert into a dimwit caught up in dangerous matters way over his head, defined by the misadventures befalling his prosthetic eye. Most of the supporting actors—Matthias Schoenaerts and Alessandro Nivola as the investigating detectives; Rami Malek as a millionaire industrialist; Anya Taylor Joy as Malek's wife—take their cues from Bale, presenting the impression of a farce, but one with a humor-killing pacing where people seem to be sitting around waiting for something interesting to happen.

It all builds to a finale at a veterans' reunion party, with Robert DeNiro as a general giving what may be a history-changing speech. Russell is clearly reveling in how the historical seed of his story mirrors certain contemporary events in American politics, and he's not above stopping the movie dead in its tracks for an interminable denouement where those parallels are underlined and everything we've just seen is repeated back to us. And throughout it all, while people are standing around pontificating and monologuing, Bale's Bert—theoretically the audience surrogate as narrator—is virtually catatonic. Amsterdam keeps trying to introduce a weird sense of humor into its serious themes, but in a way that's almost never funny, and far more often actively irritating. On behalf of the tone police, it's hard not to consider making a citizen's arrest.