The writer and director of goofball comedies took a serious turn over the past decade and hasn’t looked back — This piece is part of The Whiplash Decade, a package on the wild ride that was the 2010s. Toward the end of Vice, Adam McKay’s 2018 biopic about the rise of Dick Cheney and his shadow presidency during the George W. Bush years, Christian Bale, nearly unrecognizable as the former…