阿姆斯特丹

Amsterdam (5/10 stars)

The Art of Cameos

Despite the film’s lavishing cast, Amsterdam is simply a celebrity-busted, all-about-appearance, advocating-love-in-center-of-corruption piece of work.

Though with accomplished actors and actresses like Christian Bale, Margot Robbie, Robert De Niro, and Rami Malek, all characters are insufferably plain, static throughout the storyline, and are unimaginably horrendous when it comes to dialogues, which are surfeited with emotionless conveyances without the support of convincing performances. In fact, all the characters seem to have been pushed by the script to converse, react, and move along the plot.

After the insipid two acts of elaboration and foreshadowing, the movie concludes in rather decent finale, where power-hungry nazism-supporting bureaucrats collide with the angelic Margot Robbie and friends - “decent” means somewhat commendable in this film, which is equivalent to below average for other movies. Why would the talented director of Silver Linings Playbook pay a dozen of renowned actors, and employing Imax, just to produce such a flavorless result? If this was not my 100th movie review, I would’ve given Amsterdam a 4 star.