Vice is a comedy, and can be quite funny at times, but the dominant feeling I had was not joy. It was anger. And I'm pretty sure that was director Adam McKay’s goal, with laughter as a secondary objective. The film's political bias (although it makes the argument it's simply a humanity bias) is in plain view, and that education appears to be main purpose other than letting us watch Christian Bale play this part. When you have a villain as the lead in your story, it’s typically important for the audience to be on their side at some point, but while Vice often shows (or strongly implies) Dick Cheney’s motivation for his awful acts and beliefs, it never agrees with him, and certainly never wants the audience to be on his side. I enjoyed Vice quite a bit. That’s important to get out up front since I think this review might read more negative than it is. This is a very well made and entertaining film led by incredible performances. It is very funny, it’s just not fun. I can’t help but compare it to McKay’s previous film The Big Short, since they both reflect and educate on terrible recent events using entertainment and comedy. The Big Short was painful at times, and there’s no question the effects of the housing crisis are still being felt, but by the time that came out the economy was in a much better place. Vice is a more overt comedy, yet I probably laughed less because of our current political environment. The consequences of Dick Cheney’s actions are still impacting poor policy at home and getting people killed around the world. Maybe if Vice came out 3 years ago or in 3 years (I’m optimistic) it might have been more enjoyable, but right now it’s difficult to watch since we’re still drifting through the wake of his story. Vice shows the life of Dick Cheney, from his college days, to senate intern, to Senator, Secretary of Defense, Chief of Staff, working with Nixon, Reagan, Bush Sr., and of course his time as Vice President to George W. It’s fascinating to watch the machinations of the most powerful republicans, but we only get brief stops in his earlier career, showing the greatest hits of not only Cheney, but the party in general. Whether entirely true or not, a lot of blame is put on him as the architect of the current establishment, a huge driving force to where our politics are today. To make it worse he is initially presented as having very few ideals of his own, just a desire to work for the charismatic Donald Rumsfeld who becomes his first mentor and colleague. Once inside DC, Cheney quickly learned how to play the game better (i.e. more ruthlessly) than anyone else, and his goal became the procurement of power, plain and simple. Vice shows how intelligent people can take advantage of the power given to them by government, and that as much as we might want politics to be ideological, and checks & balances set-in-stone, it’s ignorant to think they’re not a little fluid. When someone like Dick Cheney is in power, he can use the public bureaucracy to his advantage, whether that is enriching himself by seizing Iraqi oil fields, empowering himself with questionable constitutional interpretations, or putting judges and cabinet members in place to help him do these things, almost all of which come with global collateral damage. No matter what was going on around him, Christian Bale’s performance as Cheney would be worth the price of a ticket by itself. This may be his most remarkable achievement so far, embodying the evolution of the physicality, voice, body, and aura of Cheney as he accumulates power. His bombast and ruthlessness seethes beneath the surface before being broken free by the end, especially in the final scenes when he has essentially completed his career and ceases to care what the public thinks. A new swagger envelops Cheney’s entire personality, except when he returns home to his family. Bale clearly shows that change every time Dick is with his wife Lynn, and Amy Adams is wonderful as the other half of that relationship. She and Bale have worked together several times, so their chemistry is undeniable, and these are two of the best actors of their generation bouncing off each other, exuding the unbreakable love between their characters. Lynn is not the silent supportive wife though, and is not let off the hook by the end, shown to be a formidable manipulative force behind the scenes, a role Adams fits well: the ‘innocent’ suppoertive devil. Beyond Adams and Bale, the only actors with substantial parts are Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfeld and Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush. These two are perfectly cast into what ultimately become two borderline buffoonish roles. Carrell has some experience playing an inappropriate boss, and Rumsfeld is a haven for dirty jokes, presented here as the original id of Dick Cheney’s career. Imagine an evil, intelligent Michael Scott, that’s what Rumsfeld is, and Carrell is great at it. Rockwell had a tougher role as W. given how familiar we are with him, and how often his intelligence has been lampooned. Some of that is here, but he balances that level of comedy, while showing Bush as a little more intelligent than people give him credit for (either that or he just seems more brilliant by the day compared to our current president). Bush is the one of the most empathetic characters in the entire film, a man who simply wanted approval from his dad and his dad’s friends, including Dick Cheney, who recognizes this and takes advantage of the boyish desperation to seize additional power. W. comes across as a hapless bystander, but far from an innocent one. The rest of the cast is good, but Allison Pill is the other highlight as Mary Cheney, Dick and Lynn’s gay daughter who becomes an electoral liability. Tyler Perry has a couple scenes as Colin Powell, but he doesn't do much with the juicy material. McKay uses some of the same stylistic flourishes as he did in The Big Short, and they make Vice speed along. Jesse Plemons serves as narrator/explainer, getting across the difficult political details quickly whenever they are necessary to the understanding of a scene. If this was someone less likeable than Plemons, it could have been an absolute disaster, but he becomes a beacon of light in the very dark story, and eventually intersects with it. The narrator’s existence is a pleasant symptom of the short, single-scene fly-bys of Cheney’s early career, but he's not over-used. It seems like McKay was simply too ambitious. Based on the message he was trying to convey, it would have made sense to only focus on Cheney’s days as vice president, and dive into that further rather than including how he got there. I think my preference may have been the opposite though, if we saw how Cheney came through the ranks of the Republican party, and his effect on everything that still exists to this day. We’re more familiar with his crimes as VP, so it might have been interesting to have a deeper exploration of those early days. Vice lays out a very good case for why Cheney and many of his colleagues are war criminals that should be prosecuted. It's more entertaining than a court case, but it does feel a bit like it's just going through a stack of evidence. By the end of the film, it even treats Cheney as an evil zombie or Frankenstein’s monster. In 10 years, hopefully we’ll all be in a better place and this will be a fun (still sad) movie filled with great performances, but right now, it’s a terrifying, upsetting, frustrating, anger-inducing movie that contains some good jokes. That works, just not as well as it should.
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