Vice
It pulls no punches yet misses the target
Written and directed by Adam McKay, this movie about Dick Cheney is painful to watch. Not because it’s terrible, but because it brings back traumatic memories of the days not that long ago when Cheney was the acting president of the United States. Coming out in the Trump era, in which the news cycle of government dysfunction spins so fast, Vice has the strange property of making the early 2000s look like ancient history. Today, we are concerned with the daily assaults that the Trump administration commits against democracy and the rule of law, but Vice serves as a fresh and brutal reminder that our current travesty has precedent. It shows how the office of presumably the most powerful person on Earth is a magnet for the power hungry, which if wily enough, can send our vaunted checks and balances on a hike to nowhere.
As he did in The Big Short, his movie about the financial collapse of 2008, McKay uses a style that can be loosely called collage, interspersing actors with real footage, using ironic titles, and having actors break the fourth wall and speak directly to camera. Vice doesn’t have much of a plot but it’s a fast, furious and not very detailed account of how Cheney got from being a drunk electrician in Wyoming to CEO of Halliburton and de facto President of the US.
