Movie Review: Vice
Richard “Dick” Bruce Cheney. For those who haven’t heard of this name, the name belongs to a person who is widely considered as the most powerful Vice President in the US history. He is also the least popular man to have been in that office.
Vice, is a satirical movie about him and how he came to power and what he did with that power. Going in, I had no idea who Dick Cheney was and what his life has been. Coming out of the movie, it seemed like everything wrong with the world is because of Cheney. Whether, you agree with it or not, that’s what the movie is saying.
The entire movie plays out like one long montage encompassing the life of the former vice president, from his days as a teenager who dropped out of Yale to become cable installation man right up to the end of his second term in 2008. Determined to not let his wife down again, after he gets arrested for driving under influence as a young man, he ends up as an intern at the white house and slowly makes his way up. Early on, he gets to experience the full power of executive authority when he overhears a conversation involving Nixon about the bombing of Cambodia and latches onto the idea of attaining that power.
It’s pretty clear that writer/director Adam McKay isn’t a fan of Cheney and so the movie looks more like a roast than a satire. There are no two sides here. As far as the movie is concerned, Cheney might very well be the devil incarnate. A sentiment shared by the actor playing him, Christian Bale.
In another one of his body transformation roles, he blends into the character seamlessly and you don’t see Bale in there, whether it was his mannerisms or the accent. Cheney had constant support of his wife Lynne, played by Amy Adams who isn’t challenged much in the role of a woman who gives credence to the phrase “behind every evil man, there is an even more evil woman”. This is the kind of performance we have come to expect of her and she delivers.
McKay, like his previous film The Big Short, finds creative ways to explain complex political policies and jargon. Unlike, The Big Short, those sequences are blended into the movie and sometimes break the flow of the plot. What we also get is a tremendous amount of B-roll shots used as metaphors to highlight the situation of our protagonist (or maybe the antagonist?…). McKay uses every 4th wall breaking technique he could, which includes rolling the credits in the middle of the film, as if to warn us that its better to not see what’s coming next be content with the ending that he’s giving you now or to give us a “what could have been” moment.
The film isn’t without its faults and there was one that stood out. If you’re making a movie about a man who shaped the world as we see it today, I would expect to see the “Why” behind it and I won’t just be content with the “What” and the “How”. The entire world follows american politics and so we know “What happened” not “Why it happened”. And since we don’t know the reasons behind the decisions, Cheney is relegated down to a cartoonish villain as opposed to a complex man. This, I believe, is the point of contention that divided the audience when it came out.
The movie ends with a mid credit scene, showing a focus group discussing the movie, which turns violent when one of the participants who felt the move was “too liberal” attacks another who questions him. While, another participant says, she cant wait for the new Fast and Furious film. This scene is probably meant as snide comment at the audience who doesn’t care about the political scenarios that surround them. But one has to ask, if the film itself doesn’t care about exploring the psyche of a man who the film is about then why should the audience or maybe the whole scene is to represent current generation and an explanation for why the film just stuck to the “What” and the “How”. Who knows.