134 min | R | October 7, 2022 | 20th Century Studios
Three friends make a pact in postwar Amsterdam and swear to look out for each other for life. Years later a senator dies, his daughter ends up dead, and the friends are framed for the murder. The conspiracy is real and the movie still cannot find its way to it.
Burt Berendsen is a doctor with a glass eye and a back full of shrapnel who patches up fellow veterans in 1930s New York. His old war buddy Harold Woodman is a lawyer. When a client asks them to investigate her father’s death, an autopsy turns into a murder accusation that puts both men on the run. The film is built around the Business Plot, a real 1933 scheme by financiers to install a fascist strongman over Franklin Roosevelt. David O. Russell turns that genuine historical hook into a screwball caper and then loses it inside flashbacks, voiceover, and digressions that smother the actual stakes.
Christian Bale plays Burt as a twitchy, eager wreck who keeps adjusting his glass eye and apologizing for his own injuries. The performance is committed and exhausting in equal measure. Margot Robbie plays Valerie Voze, a nurse turned artist who makes sculptures out of shrapnel pulled from wounded men, and she gives the trio its only genuine warmth. John David Washington plays Harold with a steadiness that the script never rewards. Robert De Niro arrives late as a general the conspirators want to recruit, and his single big speech carries more weight than the hour of whimsy that precedes it.
Russell directs his own script and crowds every frame with movement that never builds momentum. The flashback to the friends in Amsterdam is shot in warm amber by cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki and stands apart as the one stretch where the camera and the actors breathe together. The editing cuts between three timelines and a dozen subplots, and the constant reshuffling drains tension instead of generating it. Burt’s voiceover narration explains events the images already show. The production design recreates period New York with real detail, and the detail goes to waste because the story refuses to sit still long enough to inhabit it.
The film keeps insisting it is a story about loyalty and decency standing against fascism. It states that theme out loud rather than dramatizing it. The cast is enormous and most of it is stranded. Russell has the bones of a sharp political thriller and a true story that deserves attention, and he buries both under mannerism and quirk until the conspiracy at the center feels like an afterthought.