Focus too much on characters, not enough on story

Rating: 4/10 (24 January 2014)

The Academy must be full of some very strange people. Every year they seem to love the mediocrity Hollywood spews out and completely ignore some of the brilliance that presents itself. I hear the process is all very political and I quite believe it. I did not enjoy 'American Hustle' much at all and yet there it is with 10 Oscar nominations and probably third in the running to win Best Picture.
I read something very interesting in the trivia section: According to Christian Bale much of the movie was improvised. So, during the shooting of the film he noted to David O. Russell, "You realize that this is going to change the plot greatly down track." To which the director replied, "Christian, I hate plots. I am all about characters, that's it."
I think the above is why I didn't like the movie. Russell completely sacrifices the flow and entertainment of the story just so that his actors could have a playground to present their characters on. The best directors don't need to make this sacrifice. It must be said though that with back to back films of his getting nominations in all four acting categories at the Academy Awards more and more actors and actresses will be lining up to work with him.
Of the four that were nominated I thought Jennifer Lawrence was the best. She just doesn't know how to give a bad performance that girl and it's impressive. In 'American Hustle' she was probably playing a character suited to a slightly older actress, and yet that only occurs to you as an afterthought because she plays it so damn well. Christian Bale and Amy Adams were excellent, and slightly lower down the chain for me was Bradley Cooper. His felt the least Oscar-worthy of the four for me.
Con man movies can be so much fun like 'Ocean's Eleven' but Russell has just managed to suck all the life out of this one. You can't do a movie like this without some kind of twist (the good ones have more than one), and there is a minor one in 'American Hustle', but it feels so phoned in and predictable that you can truly see how little effort was put into the story on this one. Very disappointing.
While watching this you can't help but compare it to 'The Wolf of Wall Street' (or the other way around depending on which you saw first). They have a lot of similarities and have obviously been released around the same time and are contesting for the a lot of the same awards. But one of them is infinitely superior to the other. One has a run time of 180 minutes but feels like it barely lasts an hour, while the other runs 138 minutes but drags on and on and on. Martin Scorsese has shown David O. Russell up big time this year.