Vice: Much Too Much

I'm not going to mince my words: Vice is a terrible movie. Halfway through watching it, I turned to my friend Katie, and literally went, "oh god, this is terrible." So if you were looking for a rave review, go elsewhere. However, for a dissection of how this movie went off the rails, read on.

Starring Christian Bale as Dick Cheney and Amy Adams as his wife Lynne, this is the story of how a "dirtbag" from Wyoming ended up becoming the most powerful Vice President in the history of the United States. The movie opens with 9/11 and Dick invoking executive authority in the Situation Room to make a lot of important decisions while the President is nowhere in sight. And then we flash back to follow his rise to power, starting off as a congressional intern to Donald Rumsfeld (played by Steve Carell, the only actor who doesn't quite manage to disappear into his role). 

The actors are the greatest thing about this movie. Christian Bale is well-nigh unrecognizable when he's portraying the older Cheney, and Amy Adams is brilliant, a veritable Lady Macbeth who drives Dick on to pursue greater and greater heights. Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush provides an awful lot of comic relief (much like the real man himself, sadly), and Tyler Perry has a rather marvelous turn as Colin Powell. But written and directed by Adam McKay, this movie is like a two-hour SNL sketch on cocaine.

You'll recognize a lot of the cinematic gimmicks and flourishes from The Big Short, McKay's previous film that served to explain the financial crisis in an engaging and informative manner. Unfortunately, in this movie, we're talking about gruesome wars and torture, not mortgage-backed securities. I don't need to repeatedly be reminded of the horrors of the Abu Ghraib prison and have scenes of bombing innocent civilians in Cambodia or Iraq unexpectedly flash up on the screen with no warning. It's a gimmick that almost trivializes those horrors. And there's the usual cameos of random actors breaking the fourth wall or text flashing up on the screen so you know exactly how important the unitary executive theory is and that it will be the point of the whole damn movie - did you not get that? Let's put it up on the screen five more times in ALL CAPS. 

Listen, I get it, Dick Cheney is an evil man. The only nice thing he does in the entire film is stand by his gay daughter, Mary, and he eventually turns on that too like a true cartoon villain. Interestingly, we get a lot more backstory about Lynne's parents and upbringing, but nothing at all about Dick's. And that's the trouble with this whole movie. It starts off with the premise, Dick Cheney is evil, so it's not interested in saying anything more beyond that. It's just going to serve up a litany of his abuses in as gruesome and offputtingly comedic a manner as possible. It is an ADHD nightmare, scampering from horror to horror, rapidly flicking through random frames of violence and apocalyptic scenarios while dreadful music plays in the background, because the audience would not otherwise understand that we are supposed to be appalled by what's happening in the White House.

Vice is a liberal scaremongering film, out to tell us about all the unprecedented authority Dick Cheney amassed while he was Vice President, so now we should all be terrified that Trump and Pence will do the same. Unlike The Big Short, where the entire audience could get behind it because we all universally agree that bankers are demon spawn, this is a movie that is guaranteed to anger half the nation and further their belief that all Democrats want to do is rabble rouse and attack Republicans. I already had a poor opinion of Dick Cheney going into this film. What I did not expect was that I would leave with a decidedly poor opinion of a liberal filmmaker.