Derivative junk from a Scorsese-wannabe and his preening gallery of actors

Rating: 2/10 (18 November 2019)

This dreck is assembled 13-year-old thinks-he's-smart-schoolboy style from an assortment of paint-by-numbers film elements the ambitious but woefully-unoriginal director David Russell has chosen from the collected works of his idols- and betters- especially Martin Scorsese, but also "Chinatown"-era Robert Towne and a number of other '70s once-idolized anti-Hollywood-establishment honchos- Dennis Hopper, Bob Rafelson, Robert Altman, you name it. Have no doubt: Russell wants his name equal in the cinephile-intellectual's mind with these legends. "With-it" period music that may or may not be in synch with the actual narrative? It's here, and stolen straight from Scorsese's 1973 breakthrough feature-length, "Mean Streets." Wise guys with aching hearts and "sympathetic" (but only in the most obvious, simplistic Hollywood-esque ways) character flaws? Ditto. Acting as if in a '70s method class presided over by an increasingly exasperated Harvey Keitel? Here to the gills, provided to us by the likes of Christian Bale, Jennifer Lawrence, and Bradley Cooper, among others.
The story purports to be based on the Abscam sting operation by the Feds in the late 1970s and early 1980s, but is really more an excuse for Russell to show off to us his auteurist "chops" and for the increasingly annoying cast to preen and mewl before us.
The actual Abscam brought down several prominent U.S. members of Congress, including the once-beloved Harrison Williams, Democratic senator of New Jersey, and had one actual hero, former U.S. Senator Larry Pressler, Republican of South Dakota, the first American combat veteran of the Vietnam War to be elected to Congress, and who was captured on tape angrily walking out of a meeting when he thought it was a "legitimate" bribery scheme to influence U.S. legislators' votes on issues of Middle East policy. Not that you'd know any of this from this showy, extremely annoying, derivative, glitzy, full-of-itself waste of time. Pressler, now 77 and long retired, was that rarity- an independent-minded moderate Republican who refused to cave to any political fashion or trend, and least of all the fascist demagoguery that currently sits at the head of his party and has infected it at all levels. In fact, the contrast between the Republicanism of a Larry Pressler and that of Donald Trump and his toadies and enablers would make for a very interesting and absorbing movie in and of itself. Not that David Russell and his equally obtuse collaborators would ever imagine or wish to do anything of that nature- THAT would be too TRULY creative and original for us. So instead they give this flashy-gaudy third-generation-Las-Vegas-casino of a movie. No thanks.