Vice 2018
Vice was not a movie I intended to see. I wasn’t crazy about Adam McKay’s earlier movie The Big Short which I thought did a poor job of explaining the mortgage crisis. I also was not a fan of Oliver Stone’s W, which this movie seems to emulate in its satirical but strongly biased approach. However, when it was nominated for an Academy Award for best picture, I thought maybe it would be worth it, at least so I could compare it to the other nominees.
It lived up to my expectations and is really not very good. McKay doesn’t seem to have a clear message and again is not very good at explaining anything. Instead of trying to determine how Dick Cheney was able to drag America into a war on terror by invading Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people who had nothing to do with terrorism, he spends a lot of time humanizing Cheney by showing his home life. Instead of explaining how Cheney was able to get into Yale or get a job as a Congressional intern, or Chief of Staff for Nixon, or CEO of Halliburton, these things just happen to him. Maybe McKay didn’t understand that in the first place. Political movies are very hard to do well. Satire is maybe easier, but Dick Cheney satire is pretty stale at this point, especially since it isn’t even that good. The previews make the movie look kind of like a comedy, but there is almost nothing funny here. Even Sam Rockwell’s George Bush is nothing but a caricatured impression with a fairly small part. And Cheney as a character is just kind of a quiet blob, while his wife actually seems to be the one with drive and determination. About the only thing funny is Cheney’s subdued reaction when he is having heart attacks.
The movie is still sort of entertaining, but mostly in anticipation of some kind of payoff explaining Cheney or showing his evil plans come to fruition, but he mostly just seems to be along for the ride as the larger political winds blow back and forth between Republican and Democratic control, ticking off well-known Cheney moments one by one. The performances are good, but in the previews Christian Bale seemed to look more like Cheney than in the movie and he is mostly just a smirking blob with a Cheney imitation that almost anyone can do. Amy Adams has a big part as Lynne Cheney, but everyone is pretty much cardboard cutouts, not well developed characters. A large cast of side characters get no development at all, just cameos. Not funny enough to be satire and not informative enough to be enlightening, made ten years after Bush left office, I wonder why this movie was made.Written: 09 Feb 2019