Amsterdam Empire, review: secrets and betrayals in the cannabis empire

A prologue that aims to disorient in Amsterdam Empire, beginning with the protagonist Jack van Doorn being shot on a bridge in the Dutch capital. From there, the story takes us back, opting for a flashback – spanning several episodes before rejoining the opening event – in which we discover who this man is and the motivations that led him to find himself in such a dramatic situation.

Jack is the owner of The Jackal, managing a veritable empire of legal coffee shops selling high-quality cannabis. A rich and powerful man who for twenty years built his fortune while systematically cheating on Betty, his wife and former music star, who abandoned her career to become a kind of local high-society housewife. When she discovers yet another unfaithful affair and Jack announces he wants a divorce to marry TV presenter Marjolain, something in her definitively breaks. Betty now not only wants revenge, but intends to definitively ruin her husband and steal his lucrative business.

In Amsterdam Empire, perdition is near

It seems that the watchword for contemporary seriality is not so much to cultivate the quality of the story but to complicate it as much as possible, with a whirlwind of events and plot twists in an attempt to always keep the audience's interest high. And Amsterdam Empire, a new Dutch-produced Netflix original in seven episodes, is no exception, inserting a significant number of subplots and secondary figures to inexorably entangle the protagonist's life. The protagonist himself is certainly no saint, just like his – not yet officially – ex-wife who intends to make him pay at all costs for his extra-marital "mischief": toxic family dynamics in the post-Succession era, but here declined in a lighter and more grotesque key than usual.

After all, the setting in Amsterdam and cannabis at the center of the story as the golden goose represented by The Jackal, an iconic and historic venue that becomes the stage and object of contention between the two former lovers, left little to the imagination. But when Jack's other children from a previous marriage, some more, some less involved in the business, and then various assorted criminal gangs come into play, the script falters and risks losing sight of what it actually wanted to tell, so much so that the partially open ending is no longer a surprise to anyone.

Minds and faces

It's no coincidence that the genesis behind the series is thanks to the trio formed by Nico Moolenaar, Piet Matthys, and Bart Uytdenhouwen, already responsible for the international successes Undercover (2019-2021) and Ferry (2021). Operations with which Amsterdam Empire has several things in common, starting precisely with the characterization of the various characters, the protagonist first and foremost, and the aforementioned tones, always balancing between dark humor and a more bitter tension in certain passages. The cast can count on the swaggering nature of Jacob Derwig, the right face in the right place for the role of Jack, on the nervous and âgée charm of a rediscovered Famke Janssen, although the "third wheel" of Elise Schaap stands out.

There are also a couple of flashbacks with digitally rejuvenated actors – a de-aging, it must be said, that is quite credible and successful – to further thicken a plot that often gets lost over the course of the seven episodes, and which would have needed a considerable pruning during editing. Here, however, the narrative becomes quite redundant and, worse, almost nothing is resolved in the epilogue, returning to that starting point specifically aimed at opening up to a probable continuation, viewership permitting.