I remember Amsterdam coming out vaguely last year. I’m guessing they slipped up on promotion of the movie because nobody wanted to see it and it became a box office bomb. Which is strange because there’s a star studded cast of so many people. Even Taylor Swift is in the movie, but not as long as this poster suggests.

Amsterdam is very loosely based on events from the 1930s. The movie is sparked by the death of an old World War I general who was poisoned in a quite bit of a mystery.

One of his old soldiers is a doctor named Burt Berendsen and he is asked by the family to perform an autopsy. The general was indeed murdered and he somehow becomes a detective to help figure it out.

We’ve then see flashbacks from his time during late World War I. Burt Berendsen and most of his fellow comrades are badly injured in battle. He bonds well with a African-American soldier named Harold Woodman and Woodman falls in love with a white American woman who can speak French. They all live in Amsterdam after the war, but Burt Berendsen breaks the harmony when he decides to move back to the United States to see his estranged wife.

Back in the present day, they realize that the general’s death is even more than just a simple murder of malice. There’s a big conspiracy behind it and a lot of unshady characters in the darkness.

And more things are connected than it would appear. But what’s really going on behind the scenes?

Honestly I can see why Amsterdam was a critical failure and a commercial blunder. It’s got a great cast, superb production values, with impressive acting as well. The fault is the script and while it’s based loosely on a obscure event in history, it’s overly ambitious, loses its direction, and it’s honestly a little too confusing. It’s got a lot of merit and it could have been one of those films that could have swept the Oscars, but they dropped the ball. I liked it, but I was far from loving it.