Vice follows Dick Cheney’s precipitous rise to power and his everlasting effect on American politics
Quick review: Vice tries to grapple with the second Bush’s years in office through Dick Cheney but ends up with nothing to show for its efforts.
Vice ends with Dick Cheney (Christian Bale under a heavy amount of makeup) turning to the camera and saying, “You chose me. And I did what you asked.” Then the movie’s end credits are played over “America” from West Side Story. It’s an infuriating end to a movie that had its issues but wasn’t completely a miss until it let on that it had no idea what it was trying to say.
Sit through the end credits. Then witness the movie’s full-hearted reprehensible attempt at a BlacKkKlansman style “but this is happening today” coda that is meant to tie the movie together.
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Never in cinematic history has a movie so stunningly tear itself apart in less than 30 seconds — the final 30 seconds, no less.
Dick Cheney changed the world when he came to power in the second Bush administration as the Vice President. Our current terrifying political environment didn’t start in 2016. It’s been this way for nearly two decades.
After a surprisingly typical biopic opening act that follows Cheney from his short time at Yale that ended with him dropping out to his stint blue collar worker that gets too drunk after his shift to an intern for Don Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) to the White House Chief of Staff to the Secretary of Defense under Bush senior to the Vice President to George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell following up his Oscar win for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri).
What all these experiences have in common is that Cheney, driven by his Lady Macbeth-like wife Lynne (standout Amy Adams), is that he fails up. The section isn’t incredibly inspired.
The whole story is framed by a mysterious narrator (Jesse Plemons, who was a scene-stealer in Game Night earlier this year) who talks straight to the camera and has all the bells and whistles director Adam McKay used in his Oscar-winning The Big Short — hyperactive visual cut-ins, breaking the fourth wall, quick montages through history. It is a satire after all.
But about 40 minutes in, Vice makes a clear pivot to make Dick Cheney the clear villain of the story. But shouldn’t he always have been? Even after this pivot, though, the movie doesn’t always make clear its point-of-view. It tells us a lot about the Bush/Cheney years — the Florida recount, 9/11, the invasion of Iraq — but doesn’t give us any material or insights to grapple with what happened. Instead, it satirizes those actions.
The story of Dick Cheney is a hard one to make funny because the implications of his story are dead serious — something the movie tries to say in the final minutes. It doesn’t help either that Cheney becomes completely opaque in the second half. We never know why he’s doing anything. Neither does McKay.
“You chose me. And I did what you asked.” Adam McKay’s version of “you reap what you sow.” Even though Vice attempts to villainize Cheney, its final beats blame us — the citizens of this country. Not the system that puts men like Cheney in power. It blames us. But we didn’t choose you to tell this story, McKay. This isn’t what we asked for.
Hey, I'm Karl, founder and film critic at Smash Cut. I started Smash Cut in 2014 to share my love of movies and give a perspective I haven't yet seen represented. I'm also an editor at The New York Times, a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, and a member of the Online Film Critics Society.
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