Amsterdamned II: Sorry, but I ordered the steak?

2025 has been characterised by directors attempting to revitalise their careers by revisiting long-dormant franchises – to varying degrees of success. In that regard, Amsterdamned II sees Dutch B-movie auteur Dick Maas fare better than Rob Reiner, but fail to hit the heights of Danny Boyle; serving up an unapologetic feast of meaty action set-pieces, but undermining it’s promises of red blooded realism by including a side-order of AI slop on the plate.

Talking about national cinemas of any kind is risky business. There is always the risk of painting in broad strokes, or of caricaturing a complex and multifaceted industry, so before I go further, please note that filmmaking in the Netherlands is incredibly diverse – as I hope I have shown in my regular reviews with Indy Film Library – and there are a billion exceptions to every ‘rule’.

With that being said, broadly I would say this. Dutch cinema is at its best when it goes its own way; when its talent is not forced to conform to Hollywood’s identikit output, and either tell new stories, or put a surly, characteristically ‘direct’ spin on them. Dick Maas is someone I have written about before, as a prime example of that latter option.

De Lift is a wonderful blend of ridiculous thrills, bad-taste scenarios, and deadpan comedy, which takes on the norms and plot beats of an American sci-fi horror, but delivers them in a purposefully underwhelming style. Replace a hard-boiled detective uncovering a murderous machine at the heart of an unfeeling corporation, and replace that with an elevator mechanic who holidays in Texel, battling a gooey, sentient lift – crossing some blatant lines Hollywood was reluctant to breach (Maas enjoys feeding children, blind people, etc, to his monsters) – and you have something really, genuinely special.

Maas unfortunately would later try to break America – and found to his cost that reverse-engineering US-style thrillers from a Dutch perspective did not deliver on the same level. After the flat-lining Denis Leary-vehicle Do Not Disturb, he was offered the chance to adapt De Lift for subtitle-adverse American audiences, and produced Down – regarded widely as his dullest film, if not his outright worst.

Maas returned to Dutch-language cinema was a short burst of Amsterdam-based movies – including the wonderfully irreverent Sint,and a slightly by-the-numbers creature feature Prooi. While the film about a lion rampaging through the Dutch capital’s centre proved a hit in China (grossing over $6 million, making it one of his biggest financial hits), in the Netherlands it brought in just $231,548 (one of his worst domestic performances). Maas subsequently decided to bide his time with his next attempt – and as seems to have become fashionable for directors looking to reboot their careers at the moment, he eventually decided to revisit arguably his greatest work.

That is no guarantee of success, of course. Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s 28 Years Later managed to give fans what they’d been yearning for, for decades, while still breathing fresh life and ideas into the franchise, Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap II: The End Continues was a pale imitator of the original; a timid cover-band masquerading as the real thing.

Somewhere in between, nine years after Maas’ last cinematic outing, floats Amsterdamned II.

Something old, something new…

I have to be careful here, because I have a tendency to talk myself into disliking films that I actually really enjoyed in the heat of the moment. The fact stands, though, that first and foremost, I genuinely liked Amsterdamned II. I exited the cinema with a big, dumb smile on my face – whatever conclusions I reached after the fact.

With that being said, a film where things fall apart the moment you try to remember it is not something I can wholeheartedly recommend, either. There is a certain degree of convolution which becomes necessary, if you are going to try and revive a story which finished conclusively in the first place, almost four decades ago. And for all his strengths as an acerbic satirist of cinematic conventions, Maas seems unwilling to lean into this in the way he is willing to play to some of the film’s other purposefully underwhelming moments.

Maas regular Huub Stapel is back as the now-retired detective Eric Visser, as is some approximation of the original killer, stalking their prey from the depths of Amsterdam’s canal system. Obviously, since we saw that person brutally meet their end in Amsterdamned, it can’t literally be them. But the workaround eventually delivered feels like an after-thought, as though it were something called on the fly during shooting, with the idea it could be better foreshadowed in post – and whoever’s job it was to that was not taking notes. So, we essentially meet the big bad of the film only once – and when their silent face is presented as some momentous reveal, several people in the IMAX delivered a perplexed, “Heh?”

At the same time, Stapel is now in his 70s – and while he still has enough life in him to walk convincingly in heels, as an action lead, ‘Eric’ needs a little help. To that end, Holly Mae Brood is introduced as Tara Lee – a young and ambitious detective working in Eric’s old department. But while she seems primed to be built up as his eventual successor, she ends up sidelined both in her involvement in the key action scenes, and the film’s emotional stakes.

Tara is established, in some very abrupt and underdeveloped scenes, to have a sister who lives with a domestic abuser, and has relapsed into drug addiction as a coping mechanism. Maas’ script then feels obliged to hit certain beats around that story – a moment where the sisters reunite, a moment where the abuse ends – but does not feel the need to either knit them into the A-plot, or to offer up any meaningful level of detail. Considering such a difficult topic requires deeper exploration to do it real justice, it is unclear why any of that happens at all – other than as a cheapened mechanism to simply give Tara, whose character doesn’t really have an arc in relation to the case, something to do.

The young hero, and her young stunt double, also disappear from one of the film’s major action sequences after taking a significant bump – being thrown from the windscreen of a moving speedboat, into an Amsterdam canal. But having been given a glimpse of the heavy-lifting the character enables, Maas seems reluctant to use her in this way again, and instead Eric is left to – somewhat implausibly – handle the bulk of the action too.

In certain moments, admittedly, is for the best, as it does open up the chance for some of the wonderfully understated brand of comedy Maas’ films do so well. At the end of the high-octane speedboat chase – which doesn’t manage to one-up the gloriously ridiculous pursuit in the original, but comes damned close – Eric is forced to pursue his similarly aged suspect on foot, the tempo pointedly shifting from lightning quick, edge-of-the-seat tension, to two old men shuffling, puffing and panting their way down a corridor, apologising to people they pass by as they gradually ascend the staircase for a classic roof-top confrontation.

I find it hard to think of a scene I have laughed harder at this year.

At the same time, Maas has not lost his eye for combining stock Hollywood thriller beats, with the more grounded sensibilities of the Netherlands. In the pivotal boat-chase, ducks flock into the canal – and a dummy of a ‘dead duck’ flops into the unsuspecting face of the suspect.

Mimicking the horrific death of Freddy Lounds in Manhunter, a pair of American tourists are tied to a ‘waterfiets’ (a pedalo, the kind on which so many a visitor has come a cropper on in the canal system) and set on fire. Elsewhere, a boat of good-hearted Green Party-types fishing plastic out of the water finds more than they bargained for, when someone dredges up a human head.

Meanwhile, in one moment of shadowy stalking, the murderous diver is shown shuffling timidly behind someone in the city centre – patently immobilised by their choice of costume, in a scene where they ought to be intimidating us. And in a climactic scene, a balding, middle-aged man in a convertible, rages at the inconvenience of ‘road-works’, having been mildly inconvenienced by military police, who have sealed off a street to keep the public away from a noted serial killer.

It’s all marvellous stuff – and often lives up to Eric’s implied billing of ‘the good old days.’

Something stolen, something AI

A central part of Eric’s character this time out, perhaps inevitably, is that life was better in his day. Most excruciatingly, this is illustrated by his disdain for plant-based ‘steaks’, which he spits back onto his plate like a big, stubbly baby.

This is tolerable, because Maas does not seem concerned with deploying his unabashed love of red meat to hark back to some Clarksonian imagined golden age of conservatism. Partially perhaps because the Netherlands he would be harking back to would in many ways be far less conservative than it is today. But more because Maas is concerned with the cinematic implications instead. Things were better when they were real. When there used to be craft, artistry and effort put into the creation of even the least successful action movies.

Maas sets about wholeheartedly proving this by offering up an array of full-fat set-pieces, uncorrupted by the hideous grey-sheen of Hollywood CGI that makes virtually all Hollywood action unwatchable now – let alone unbelievable. And as the first ever Dutch IMAX production, on the biggest of big screens, it was worth every penny of the $6 million budget (more than twice the amount the average Dutch film costs) required to make that happen.

Every twist, turn, leap and explosion is absolutely glorious.

That comes with an unfortunate caveat, though. As great as things look when they are shot authentically, with stunt-personnel, perspective tricks, or with miniatures – and how beautiful the light is when someone just chooses to shoot the city as it is – IMAX also flags up the few hideous, artificially produced frames when they do crop up.

And sure, those scenes might be incredibly brief. They might have been cobbled together last minute, when reshoots were required, but the original venue was unavailable. Whatever the case, the uncanny line that appears around the actors – for example, when the two elderly characters make it to Amsterdam’s ‘skyline’ immediately take us out of the moment. As does the ‘fire effect’ deployed to stand in for a stunt person really having to set themselves on fire soon after.

Worse, though, and significantly less defensibly, Maas opted to use generative AI for a number of ‘effects’ to skimp on budget. Apparently, there are more than 300 such moments in Amsterdamned II – the fire may well have been one – which could have taken an artist “a month” to deliver, but which AI slopped out in hour. Now, I’ve gone into this before – the reprehensible uses of AI to drive down wages and to marginalise and belittle artists; the vast environmental impacts; the utter inability of the technology to actually, seriously deliver – but the thing which is most galling about that revelation is the lack of care and craft Maas has admitted to in his own work here.

Because if he had gone and asked an artist to deliver these effects, and a month later the results were those presented to him, I would wager he would be significantly less willing to tout them as a ‘victory’ in his PR. If a human were responsible for this work, you would say it is simply not good enough. But hey, we got a plagiarism machine to try and force those jobs out of existence – so now we’re willing to pretend they are in fact better than the real thing.

This last note is a translation from an interview with Maas about the film’s underwater sequences – something which the original managed to do without computer imagery. Having decided shooting scenes in a tank was too expensive, Maas opted to shoot ‘dry for wet’ – something Hollywood has often done in recent decades, but with conventional computer trickery to finalise the imagery. Here, Maas decided to deploy AI to “technically polish” the footage instead, and the results are visually hideous; to the extent that as much as I enjoyed the film at the time – and before I knew which technologies were deployed – one of the first sentences out of my mouth following the screening was “the under-water scenes looked like they were filmed through that duck’s arse”.

From a film determined to prove that the old techniques still count for something, and that thematically the real thing is better, that leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. It’s cheap, it’s nasty, it feels like I’m being addressed by a Coca-Cola executive than a storyteller.

“There you go piggy, that slop’s good enough for the likes of you.”

That’s not what we were being sold with Amsterdamned II, though. Harking back to what remains one of my all-time favourite action films – a perfectly Dutch blend of insane stunts and real-world bluntness – we were being invited to join the team for something tangible, something real. We were promised a dry-aged Aberdeen Angus T-bone, and while we got a small portion of that, we were also served an unwelcome side of a mangled pizza, topped with glue and rocks. Honestly, I’d rather have the CG/plant-based alternative. At least a person got paid for it.