The actual film itself doesn't quite deliver on that trailer's promise. The movie is actually a bit of an overlong, disjointed mess -- veering wildly from broad comedy to conventional biopic with mixed results which explains the polarizing critical reception for the film as well.
The writer-director Adam McKay made his reputation on savagely funny comedies with Will Ferrell. They were films that played dumb but had darker, smarter jokes underneath. The Big Short, McKay's glib take on the financial crisis became his first bid for the awards circuit crowd. I had reservations about that movie too, and with Vice, it's clear McKay wants to stretch even more -- and the final result is a very interesting movie, with brilliant scenes with great insight and other moments that are startlingly heavy-handed and simplistic.
I learned things about Dick Cheney's background that I didn't already know watching the film but I am not sure I learned anything more about him that I didn't already know. There are moments where the film feels like a dressed up greatest hits (or really misses) of the first Bush administration: torture, WMD, Mission: Accomplished -- they are all here.
McKay does get that early-2000s era right -- the movie will bring back a lot of bad memories -- and the cast is game: Steve Carrell is funny and obnoxious as Rumsfeld, Amy Adams does a lot with little as Lynne Cheney and Sam Rockwell does the best Bush impression since Ferrell, although he's not in the movie much.
There are some really great comic set pieces -- like a preemptive end to the movie when McKay suggests Cheney's political career should have ended -- or a funny intimate scene between Cheney and his wife that is delivered in theatrical Shakespearean language. I almost wish the whole movie had gone for broke in that way.
At the very least the film wouldn't feel like a straightforward biopic, which despite a lot of bells and whistles this movie is.
Sure, it's got a Michael Moore-esque sense of liberal outrage that I am totally in sync with. When McKay, through title cards, lists the toll of the Iraq campaign -- your blood will boil all over again. And even though the film takes pains to humanize Cheney at points, it's thesis literally and figuratively is that he has no heart.
But why this film and why now? I did think the opening of the film -- which calls out the complacency of the American public and its willingness to indulge (vice, get it) to 'leaders' we don't really know much about, but who make us feel secure.
That was Cheney's great strength -- his gravelly, confident gravitas. A lot of people see Sarah Palin as a precursor to Trump -- but in some ways Cheney was. He was also compromised by business ties and kept his health records hidden, he too showed a frightening willingness to bend the law to meet his goals, and he too had a cold view on putting human lives at risk.
Still, I can't help but shake the feeling that Vice feels like a very good first draft of a movie. The Bale performance is interesting -- in that it reveals little more than Cheney's addiction to wielding power -- one of the revelations (for me) watching the movie was that the former VP once wanted to pursue the presidency himself but when polls showed he had no chance he settled for what he turned into the next best thing.
The talking point I always heard on Cheney was that he shunned the limelight and wanted to be the behind the scenes guy, but this film had me thinking he had no other choice. There is no doubt that he changed the way vice presidency and the presidency have been viewed ever since, and we'll grappling with is legacy for years to come. I'm fine with McKay's movie as the first pass, but it won't be the final word.
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