Another style-over-substance work from David O. Russell

Rating: 4/10 (15 September 2014)

After being heavily underwhelmed with his "Silver Linings Playbook" (especially due to the cringeworthy ending with the dancing scene and judges rating their dance), I thought maybe this could be the movie that lets me get on the David O. Russell bandwagon, especially after seeing that "American Hustle" is gonna be one of the big players of the 2013/2014 awards season. Well, it was not. Actually, it left me even more unimpressed than his previous work. He has gotten consistently worse since "The Fighter", which was decent, but not a masterpiece either. I am not familiar with his very early works "I Heart Huckabees" etc., so I will not judge these. The films he has recently been getting awards attention for, though, have not been brilliant at all.
For "American Hustle", he basically reunited the key players from "The Fighter" and "Silver Linings Playbook" (except Melissa Leo) plus Jeremy Renner. The film managed to score no less than four acting nominations and had a heavy contestant for the win in Jennifer Lawrence. Thankfully, she did not. I am yet to see a film of her that convinces me that she is an above-average talented actress. The film starts chaotic right away with the intro being taken randomly from the middle of the film and nobody knew what was actually going on. It completely relied on seeing familiar faces in stylish costumes and makeup. Zero substance. The possibly worst scene of the whole film was the "Live and let die"-sequence. I never leave a movie while it is still running, but if I did, I possibly would have here. The BAFTAs should really be ashamed for giving David O Russell two writing awards. Thanks to Spike Jonze and Lupita Nyongo for keeping him and Lawrence from winning Oscars this year.
The costumes, settings etc. are all pompous and unfortunately managed to distract many viewers from the many flaws in the storytelling. The characters are neither authentic nor likable (the latter is not a criticism) and almost all of them are so over the top that you'd expect them in a cartoon or something. One flaw for example with the sheik storyline is that if they organized a fake sheik from high authorities, they would never be so amateurish to pick somebody who cannot even speak the language which is supposed to be his mother tongue. However, we need to ignore that because otherwise the makers could not have given Robert De Niro (who was the only decent one in "Silver Linings Playbook" by the way and deserving of his nomination) a very small badass role as a gangster here.
Lawrence plays pretty much the same character as in her Oscar-winning performance and the behavior of Adams' character is completely random and rarely makes sense. First she tells Coooper's character her real identity and then she cooperates with Bale again. Why would she tell who she is if she plans on switching sides again anyway. Makes no sense at all. There are many good mobster movies post-2000, but don't get tricked by Hollywood honoring this one so much: It is not one of them. The story is confusing, doesn't make much sense on quite a few occasions. There is not much wit to the screenplay and the final bluff without the lawyer can't save it either, even if they tried building it up as some huge aha moment.
There is one quote which was also used in the trailer saying roughly that some forge paintings and others just steal money from phone booths and the former just have bigger balls. This pretty much says everything about David O Russell's talent when it comes to dialog writing. I can't recommend watching this over-2-hour-long film at all. However, I am pretty curious how people will perceive it in 20 years from now. If they will still consider it one of the best films of the year or give the edge to one of the many actually great films that did not get so much awards attention (such as the Coen's "Inside Llewyn Davis"). Anyway, I hope David O. Russell can improve on his next projects. Considerably.