Vice is Not Nice - 2019 Film Review

Directed by: Adam McKay
Written by: Adam McKay
Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell
IMDb Link

Vice has all the wit and timing of Cheney himself. For all its prestige actors and quirky ideas, the film is too often disengaging to the point of boredom, explaining every detail as laboriously as possible, and blaming the audience if they don't find it interesting.

The story follows many of the important beats in the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney (Bale), from his wild college years to constant ladder-climbing to his personal conflict being a Republican with a lesbian daughter, and capping off with his (to put it mildly) controversial work during the Bush administration. All of this is expressed through a particularly idiosyncratic lens by director Adam McKay, who tries to make the jump from a deliberately cliche presentation of his early years as a mixed bag but ultimately positive, even stepping in to full-on parody when it rolls credits over a happy ending half-way through the film, before the call from the Bush administration turns the movie in to an increasingly absurd attempt to remind people of just how cartoonishly evil he could be. It's an essentially noble idea, exposing the worst of a former administration in an effort to suggest why America has what it has now, but the film never goes beyond a very surface-level critique of those problems, bloviating endlessly about them but never offering more than a condemnation of the audience as a solution. The film seems to want to show the endless details in as tired a manner as possible to bore the audience to tears, then have a go at the audience for not paying attention to the political evil that went on, watching mindless action movies instead of "important" movies like Vice.

With that said, I don't buy that the boredom was intentional, even if the condemnation was. The film often delves in to a territory that could broadly be called "comedy", but so much of its schtick is as mind-numbing as its lecturing, and seemingly without point. Cheney orders Guantanamo torture techniques off of a menu in a restaurant, because creating absurdity through contrast is the only string to this movie's bow and it's going to try and play it in as many ways as it can. Any time the film doesn't throw an odd cutaway like this in the middle of a montage in an attempt to use The Big Short's leftovers, it turns obvious satire it never knows when to cut short. We can't know what was actually going through Dick and Lynne's minds as they pondered the offer of Vice-Presidency because people don't expose their thoughts through dialogue like they're in a Shakespearean play, so let's have a scene where Dick and Lynne Cheney expose their thoughts through dialogue like they're in a Shakespearean play, because nothing says "we have contempt for our audience" like turning an idea that would have been funny for about ten seconds in to an agonising minutes-long scene. Stuff like this both downplays the importance of what it's trying to explore and excludes the very audience it seeks to show that same importance to, which in turn clashes with the film's attempts to highlight just how absurdly, disturbingly evil the man's actions could be. The film wants very much for us to understand that Dick Cheney was a terrible person (shocking revelation, I know), but any attempts to explore the roots of what makes that sort of man are ultimately thrown by the wayside in its efforts to make every caricature involves behave increasingly arch.

There is more to these scenes thanks to performances from a cast of extremely talented actors. Bale exudes intensity as easily as breathing, which is par for the course with his career but nevertheless impressive, especially under the exceptional make-up work. The man is an inscrutable abyss, an unassuming yet undeniably powerful presence that carries the movie so hard it often leaves him weak of heart. Adams is similarly appropriate as Lynne at the best of times, the powerful woman behind the powerful man that convincingly pushes them to a place of absolute power. The other standout is Carell as Donald Rumsfeld; it's a cartoonish take that some will surely dislike, but he's the one who person who doesn't need "clever" juxtaposition through editing to be offensively funny. He's the one prominent comedic character in this supposed comedy, and his contrast with Bale is exactly the sort of dissonance for the sake of a few laughs that the movie goes for that actually works.

The Short Version: Vice is too caught up in its own self-importance and too critical of its own audience. So much of the film is a slog to get through because it painstakingly lectures the audience on plenty of details that are already common knowledge, without really adding any new insight, and any joke the film attempts to alleviate the boredom is so long-winded that it only adds to it. There's some slick performances and a good core idea on display, but it's not enough to elevate this experience beyond middling at best.

Rating: 5/10

Published February 10th, 2019