David O. Russell (Spanking the Monkey, Flirting With Disaster, Three Kings, The Fighter, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle) has a new film out, Amsterdam. It’s such a huge flop, such a massive hundred-million-dollar bomb, I couldn’t resist seeing it, just to find out what everyone hated so much.

It’s certainly an odd film, dealing with subject matter that’s very hard to summarize. The typical one-line recap goes like this: “Set in the 1930s, Amsterdam follows three friends who witness a murder, become suspects themselves, and uncover one of the most outrageous plots in American history.”

This conveys almost nothing, to begin with, about the friendship forged among three Americans, soldiers Burt Berendsen (Christian Bale) and Harold Woodman (John David Washington) and nurse who treats them, Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), whose bond begins in their shared gory, shattering experiences in World War I. They then find an unlikely Bohemian heaven together in Amsterdam after the war, which they subsequently lose in the brutal black comedy of American life. To them, the word “Amsterdam” means a paradise lost and regretted, a whole set of values and behaviors, adventures and delights, that are not possible in the United States.