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User Reviews for: Vice

toliman
CONTAINS SPOILERS2/10  5 years ago
TLDR ? This movie is Disingenuous. At best, it's a Ghoulish dark satire of the republican party during the Bush/Cheney era. Except, they forgot to insert comedy or satire. As a result, it's grim and insulting, the parody is often at the expense of the audience being too stupid or uncaring, or religious. Large chunks of american history are deleted, omitted or filtered so that the movie can focus on the death toll of the war, or the "Wazzup" meme, etc.

large chunks of Dick Cheney's history don't make it into the movie, or are stylised / exagerrated / spoofed.

It is a well made disaster of a movie. Care went into making this.

But, it's as bad as Holmes & Watson, Star Trek Discovery, The Last Jedi or Ghostbusters 2016. It's deeply unlikeable at times, and it is actively trying to rewrite history as it goes. I'm not a republican or a conservative, i don't follow politics, this is a highly deranged film that is deceptive at times, and I doubt that any of the events took place, as a result of the ham-fisted effort at painting Cheney as some mastermind villain, working in the shadows. It's only missing that villain laugh track during the more hammy moments.

The most sanguine part of the movie is that they treat the WTC bombing and 9/11 properly, but they draw an enormous bow throughout.

[spoiler]part of the movie hinges on the use of executive power being wielded by Dick Cheney through the Bush Presidency, to the degree that they'll infer it becoming part of the reasons why Cheney brought the war from Afghanistan to Iraq, and that he also used the position to secure oil reserves in Iraq before the war started, as well as ignore questions / receive kickbacks from Haliburton contracts, and infer that he brought a lawyer into the emergency/control room during the "crash" period of 9/11 post-pentagon collision, as airline flights and air corridors were shut down, airports were being closed, and private/civilian aircraft were being tracked and landed in airports, etc. So that he could wield this Executive Power without asking the senate or the Congress or the President for approval.[/spoiler]

It walks the line of defamation, and yet, apparently it's from the guy who made Anchorman 2 and Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, The Other Guys. Brad Pitt and Will Ferrel financed this movie, i think. Their companies are in the titles.

All of the Actors do a great job. I even like Annapurna for their video game productions (Donut County, Gorogoa, Edith Finch, Florence), and i've seen a handful of Annapurna movies, like Phantom Thread, Her, American Hustle, and Sausage Party...

I went in with no preparation, and assumed it would be a dark comedy with political overtones, because, politics and Steve Carell, and I can see Aquaman later on. It can't be that bad, it's Christmas week.

This movie has the unfortunate effect of making you hate theatrical movie releases and critics, and perhaps all movies.

Yet, it's so well made, it has style, artistic credibility, and it's directed, shot and lit perfectly, the sound is on point, the acting is sometimes forgettable, But it's similar in style to other "moral" drama films, like "The Big Short", leading into the Global Financial Crisis where they pander heavily on people's motives and actions of "we're getting away with it", sic. The pandering is incredible.

It is a better political movie than most, but it's utterly manipulative and disingenuous at it's heart, and nothing can make that funny or amusing.

Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 11/9 is unhinged and deranged, while Vice, is just powdercoated hatred and bile, trying to hide under progressive and democratic ideals. it's more like an upmarket youtube political conspiracy movie talking about Hilary Clinton's "SECRET Brain surgery", George Soros, the Koch brothers or the Jewish conspiracy movies you get recommended after watching "The Young Turks" or "David Pakman".

They even sink low enough to include a "Ghostbusters 2016" poke at the audience in the end credits by lampooning the partisan nature of the film, in an attempt to skirt criticism and outrage

[spoiler]A sideplot about an hour in, has a series of scenes in a focus group with the same strangers. The marketer/political consultant asks the group to raise their hands to choose between climate change or global warming. Another time, it's a choice between Estate Tax or Death Tax, inferring that marketing & political think-tanks, along with Fox News, used politically correct language in the 90's and 2000's to make conservative ideas palatable.[/spoiler]

[spoiler]At the end of the movie, Cheney is in a cross-chair interview, after just having had a heart replacement. As the interview starts, the scene pauses, and Cheney/Bale instead, turns away and lectures the audience directly (invoking Frank Underwood's, stylised yet sociopathic 'lectures' in House of Cards) , saying he did what was best for America, despite the cost and the lives lost in the war(s) sic. It's just on the borderline of "helping make america great again" and a typical Frank Underwood self-justification, we fade to black, get a terrible americana/Fly Fishing title credits to the music of West Side Story's Puerto Rican version of "Coming to America" and we return to the Focus Group, mid-credits. The final scene has the consultant ask what people thought about the movie. A member of the group, complains that the movie insults conservatives, while the neighboring person insists it's factual, with the first man then calling it liberal propaganda, and then calling the other a libtard, sic. and hits him, both getting into a fist fight, while the camera turns away, to another woman, who turns to her neighbour in the room, and says she's going to enjoy the next Fast and the Furious movie (sic). [/spoiler]

The implied comment is that they did the research, and had to improvise the story in-between, because nobody would speak about Dick Cheney's history or family to set the record straight. When/If you see a biography of Barack Obama in a few years, [spoiler] attending child brothels with kevin spacey in indonesia, ~~receiving oral sex from a pansexual transvestite, while he's snorting a line of cocaine off a preteen boy~~ [/spoiler], while another person is handing Barack a membership form for the Democratic Party ... Vice, is going to be the movie that they quote and use dialogue from.

This is the kind of movie that Alex Jones and infowars would make of Hilary Clinton & Barack Obama, by selectively omitting pages from a biography, and denigrating the characters and roles they undertook. The excuse would be, they couldn't confirm the story, so they took liberties and stuck with the facts, being transcripts, police records, licenses, marriage dates, etc.

I'm Australian, I genuinely don't care about the politics, but the smearing of the republican party is like a sledgehammer at times.

There are several Saturday Night Live level 'jokes' or skits/scenes that don't even make you cringe, they're just deeply unsettling attempts at humor or levity. Care went into the timing to paint several scenes as 'dark', or darkly funny at the expense of others. I expect people would laugh at them, it didn't connect with me, or the other 5 people in the theater.

It's not quite Fahrenheit 11/9 levels of insanity, on the contrary. It walks the line of parody, conspiracy and defamation neatly in a lighthearted attempt to skip 20 years of context, in a 2 minute conversation.

There's an early moment, perhaps 40 minutes in, where Steve Carell as Donald Rumsfeld is ruminating to a younger Dick Cheney in a random hallway of the oval office, about the imminent bombing of cambodia while Nixon is talking with Kissinger in a spare room of the Oval Office to avoid recordings. Mid-lecture, you hear Carell while we see a village about to be bombed mid-lecture, a typical cambodian/indonesian forest village, women and children sitting around, before explosions occur, and the scene changes back to Carell & Bale, unphased.

This kind of manipulative sledgehammer is used, repeatedly to invoke... satire? outrage ? compassion ?

This occurs about 5 or 6 more times, with even less subtlety.

Alfred Molina's "restaurant" scene, [spoiler] Molina's character offers Cheney and 3 seated guests at a restaurant table, Extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo Bay as menu options [/spoiler], is ham-fisted, but it's executed darkly and humorously, similar to say, Aaron Echkhart's Thank You For Smoking scenes, lampooning Tobacco, Firearms and Alcohol lobbyists.

It's the kind of movie where you could let things slide if you were a lifelong US democrat, because it tries to tell harsher truths of the political and military consequences, overtly, by flashing to bombings, drone strikes, torture, rendition, deception and greed, during the more infamous moments of nixon's career and Bush's presidency.

And it profoundly relies on Fly fishing to represent Dick Cheney, as other movies do (2007's Shooter) to the point where they use [spoiler] gaudy Americana as Fly Fishing decorations (rockets, drones, Oil Rigs, missiles, the white house, Surveillance cameras) [/spoiler] in the end-credits.

There's element's of Zero Dark Thirty in the invocation/flashes of torture, waterboarding, confinement, exposure, even the Abu Ghraib incident/leak with a prisoner being dragged by a Dog Collar by Lynndie England (the "work safe" versions) appears here. and rendition scenes along with the "Shadow government" themes of Dick Cheney's role as Vice President during George W Bush's tenure. It is highly implied several times that Cheney set himself up as the Executive, the CEO in charge of the war by undermining George Bush and, being responsible for the birth of ISIS, hiding reports from the president, etc.

They walk the line when it comes to defaming the Cheney family, there's also an implication of Lynne Cheney's father, Wayne Vincent [spoiler] murdering his wife in an argument by drowning, and of Lynne Vincent, being raped by her father Wayne in an over-edited and dubbed scene that was heavily muffled to avoid the censor noticing. Wayne, is seen pointing to his daughter during a muted, abbreviate shouting scene implying alcoholism and frequent domestic violence. [/spoiler]

It extrapolates the most defamatory versions of people, and highlights that absurdity.

It takes what should be parody or simulacra, a 'bad saturday night live' sketch comic scene, and extrapolates moments as their cheapest moments. It's also high budget, they take Sam Rockwell's version of President Bush, Governor Bush, and rotoscope him into the more infamous moments of Bush's Presidency, i.e. the mid-war "Mission Accomplished" presentation on the Carrier Deck.
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Reply by Shubniguroth
5 years ago
@toliman For someone who cares so much about "facts," it's interesting to note that you did not use "(sic)" properly /even once/ in this long ham-fisted soliloquy.
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Reply by toliman
5 years ago
@shubniguroth One "could" imagine that if **every** usage (ie the three times I used it) is flawed, there are (at least) 3 reasons. <br /> <br /> Either that: #1. I don't understand, #2. You did not, and #3. that there's a reason, subtext or point being made that was not understood.<br /> <br /> Facts aside, the film is terrible IMO. Feel free to disagree, but arguing for "grammar" makes you look irrational, retributive resentful, bitter and angry. At least talk about the film.<br /> <br /> My lackadaisical/carefree use of grammar is intended, to make a larger point later on.<br /> <br /> The film is trying to develop a conceit that people will personally accept, or reject by allowing a slippery slope. <br /> <br /> If I/you didn't have any knowledge of Cheney, and I don't, I'd probably believe the film was accurate in some ways. The Opening Quotes go that far as to say it's interpreted from biography and history of what was available. But the intent is to create "Post-Truth", a dramatic and compelling fiction based on emotions. <br /> <br /> This Post-Truth is akin to what people with Borderline Personality Disorder experience, subjective reality being distorted by their own emotional dysphoria, never recalling or storing accurate events, only emotional events that become eroded and jaded with time because their memory is overloaded by dysfunctional emotional regulation, regressive memories being reinforced with fantasies and interpreted versions; "feeling" true, rather than being true. <br /> <br /> Vice's perspective is clearly in the Post-Truth version of reality, in which Subjective drives Objective. The emotion is more important than the object, method or measured Truth. Vice, tried. It had great aspects, the film is a monument in some ways, but it's also terrible, for many of the reasons I posted when it was in theatres, and you had to pay to see it.<br /> <br /> You could have disagreed.<br /> <br /> Honestly, It does not matter. It's an opinion on "the internet", and it's grammatical consistency doesn't change the argument as it was made, ~9 months ago as a post-mortem soliloquy / diatribe / screed in cathexis for the film's waste of time, money and energy.<br /> <br /> I can appreciate that you didn't like aspects, few people appreciate opinions that aren't theirs, or have enough time/effort/wisdom to reflect before reacting. Hence, Engagement and Click-Bait's ego-driven leverage over people's emotions relies on "takes", etc.<br /> <br /> If your benevolence and altruism allows for introspection or imagination, when reading an internet comment... then #1, #2 or #3 would be valid. <br /> <br /> But, if you can't imagine or give someone "on the internet" any altruistic reading or intent, <br /> Then, #1 it's because I don't understand grammar.<br /> <br /> But, if #2, and one could be benevolent and/or that imaginative...<br /> <br /> Why would you be wrong, when Occam's Razor would point to the most reductive; i.e. #1 That I don't understand the usage of sic as a semantic reference, providing an exact quote to a movie's dialogue and script as an exact context. If you proceed with this emotive line of thinking, you can also point to the fact that I also don't use quotes properly either, and that I rely on strange tangential arguments to make an emotional metaphor, poorly. <br /> <br /> And, It's just horrible writing.<br /> <br /> It also reinforces the argument that "I don't have any idea what I'm doing", and you can thus, use this logical parry (Argument from fallacy) to dismiss all of my opinion and arguments, and ignore everything written that you disagree with, having "won" internet points in dismissing my screed. <br /> <br /> And, yes it is a screed, and perhaps Conservative Agitprop, given the content. Eh.<br /> <br /> As long as you're right.<br /> <br /> However, there's still point #2 and #3<br /> <br /> #3, I used sic, and not [sic] or (sic) as a reference or quote. <br /> <br /> Sic. has more than one context.<br /> Especially when it's deliberately not appropriate. <br /> Especially in post-modern ironic and meta-contextual semiotics, words can have their opposite intent, or act as a semiotic / referential / symbolic meaning, especially in a culture that uses verbs as brands and nouns, language and meaning can be redefined by context(s) or have multiple and parallel contexts. <br /> <br /> e.g. a "Hot Take" being a symbolic reference of grasping, or in reference to media/journalism, a sliced moment from a whole that is consumed/removed, that is "Hot", in the reference of being inflammatory in nature, but also served/prepared as if it were "heated'. <br /> <br /> Two words that can have an abundance of meaning in it's use and overuse, and meta-contextual usage, that a "take" is often removed or omitted opinion, derived to "grok", a digest /interpretation of someone's opinion or motives from a thin slice. so when you have someone's "Take"; it's often a strange or false interpretation, or a disingenuous interpretation that benefits the POV of the writer, not the reader. <br /> <br /> That context comes from its usage, and all of the other allusions, meanings and contexts of Take, i.e. theft/removal, etc. are also applicable when using Take.<br /> <br /> TLDR, everything is ironic. Even when it's not supposed to be. <br /> Especially if it's not supposed to be.<br /> <br /> Sic, without the brackets, isn't supposed to be literal. It is detached. And, being detached and used inappropriately, it is being used 'stupidly' / 'ironically' to juxtapose that it's not an actual quote, the meaning is inferred and substituted as a simile or figure of speech, that it's being used as a figure of speech. <br /> <br /> Especially when it deliberately **does not quote** a third party, and is an allusion or reference, thus being an ironic transposition or inversion of accurate reproduction. Especially because __sic erat scriptum__ is not being semantically or contextually used to quote actual dialogue or points made.<br /> <br /> Perhaps.<br /> <br /> The intent of using sic. Poorly. was to create a different semantic meaning of "Exactly" to "Inexactly", which would transpose/ridicule the intent of providing a quote, as an in-joke to the loose transcription of Cheney's biography through the film. <br /> <br /> Especially... when in the context of this review, frequent "quotes" highlight moments of poorly transposed meaning, is also a reference to Cheney's biography being opportunistically dismantled in the most alienating and least humanising way to represent someone's life.
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Reply by spdemon91
4 years ago
@toliman Thank you for saving me 2 hours of my life. Love all these actors but suspected the agenda. Fake news movie!
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AndrewBloom
8/10  5 years ago
[7.6/10] We want our villains to be lively and hateable. We want them to twirl their mustaches. We want them to show their evil loudly in public and harshly in private. We want them to be as thoroughly repugnant, devoid of human connection, that it’s clear to anyone watching how profoundly they’ve lost their way. Sure, we like a good complicated bad guy in our stories these days, but moviegoers still wants to be thrilled, chilled, and know exactly whom to root against.

Vice is a two-hour antidote to that want. It is a paean to the banality of evil -- half exposé, half resentful hagiography for a man who, on the film’s account, did more lasting damage to the world than any big screen nogoodnik imaginable, and did it all by being quiet, unnoticed, and boring.

It would be far too much to call Vice an admiring portrait of Dick Cheney. Writer-director Adam McKay clearly despises the man and all that he’s wrought, to where his film is as much a laundry list of misdeeds and power-grabs as it is a sort of unitary executive bildungsroman. McKay makes his perspective clear, both in the text and in the many direct asides to the audience in the film, which gives the viewer plenty of room to be wary of cherry-picking and slant, but which also puts the director’s cards on the table early.

And yet, there’s a sort of begrudging respect beneath the disdain at the core the film. McKay and company seem as impressed as they are aghast at what their subject accomplished despite little discernible personality and negative charisma. Vice depicts a bloodless coup, an assemblage of power for power’s sake, that flew under the radar despite being at the apex of government because it was mired in bureaucratic tedium, unshowy secrecy, and spotlight-shirking calculation. Even before Vice’s Cheney turns to the camera and delivers his A Few Good Men self-justification and non-apology, there’s a sense of bedrudging admiration next to palpable contempt at the way this superficially uninteresting guy remade our government in his image, due in no small part to seeming so thoroughly uninteresting.

That also’s the film’s grand warning. It presents the stone foundations of democracy and the firm protections of civil liberties crumbling unnoticed because the methods for their undoing are too mundane to grab people’s attentions. While the film’s depiction of partisan food fights and focus group subject more interested in the latest Fast and the Furious movie than in good governance comes off like a hoary, “get off my lawn” critique of political engagement, Vice is chiefly focused on the evil that prospers when good men do nothing, because the bad men are too steeped in jargon and wonkery to warrant much notice or care.

At the same time, it draws out the startling contrast in the staid environments in which these grand decisions are made, the lifeless conference rooms, generic offices, and bland pronouncements, with the hellfire, death, and destruction that burst forth halfway across the world. Like McKay’s last feature, The Big Show, one the biggest strengths in Vice is its editing. Nothing conveys the film’s point-of-view than when editor Hank Corwin shows the prosaic stroke of a pen or an eminently domestic family meal and juxtaposes them with the unflinching horrors of war and consequence. It emphasizes the distance between the pristine-if-unflashy world that Vice’s protagonist lives in with the muddy, thorny aftermath for the people who have to bear the brunt of his decisions.

That’s good because Vice is anything but subtle. Between the film’s narrator (who at least serves a thematic purpose in the story), the numerous title cards and chyrons, and the same type of explanatory segments used in The Big Short, the film is as much a visual essay, directly telling the audience what’s happening and how and why, and what McKay & Co. think the import is, as it is a self-contained story. To call Vice didactic would be a severe understatement, since it not only aims to straight up educate its audience, but resorts to visual over-explained visual metaphors that make The Simpsons’s Behind the Music parody look restrained.

Still, the style, while occasionally eye roll-worthy, mostly works for the film. There’s something to be said for adapting the life of such an ordinary-seeming, matter of fact man with such bombast and directness. And sometimes McKay’s predilection for playing with the form pays off, earning big laughs with a “what if” cut-to-credits and a Shakespearean interlude immediately undercut with the boring and mildly awkward reality. As amusing and showy as these moments are, they serve the film’s purposes, showing how different things might have been for want of a nail and how movies like this one dress up the decisions that change lives in the flourishes of the grandiose but which more often come down to less-than-dynamic, unphotogenic functionaries simply saying “yeah, sure.”

As much as Vice laments the consequences of that ocean of “yeah, sure”s, and harbors clear scorn for the man who uttered them, it also takes some pain to humanize Dick Cheney. It depicts him as a loving father who’s mercenary to a fault but who draws a “line in concrete” in front of his gay daughter, whom he loves and accepts unconditionally, regardless of the liability she creates for a conservative politician. And it shows him seeking power not out of some personal greed or avarice, but to live up to the best hopes of a wife that he loves, and with whom he has an ironclad partnership that balances out both some of his softer inclinations and his lack of telegenic spark.

That’s born out by the performances in the film, which toe the line between impersonation and parody on the one hand and live-in human being on the other. Christian Bale completes another startling transformation, not only gaining the girth (and the talented makeup team) to represent Cheney visually, but slipping so completely into the persona that you nigh-instantly forget that this same guy played Batman six years ago. Amy Adams more than holds the line as Lynne, Dick’s ambitious, rock-ribbed equal who communicates the conviction and determination that catalyzes and sustains the ascent at the center of the picture. Turns from Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell as recognizable figures from the Bush administration occasionally conjure up visions of a darker-edged Michael Scott or the mocking tones of producer Will Ferrell’s impression, but eventually blend undetectably into the world of the film.

It’s a world where elaborate symbolic sequences of board games and teacups are used to make sure the audience is keeping up with each development, where each of Cheney’s “greatest hits” is touched on and explicated, and where McKay attempts to attribute much, if not most, of the world’s problems in the last two decades or so one man and his particular brand of political machine. But it’s also a world where the film’s greatest villain offers no theatrical boasts or colorful schemes or boo-inducing fervor. Instead, he packs a head-down cynical pragmatism, a stultifying bearing and affect, and the slow grind of mundane, byzantine politicking that rarely makes for great stories, but which despite that, or because of it, can remake the world.
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Coronavirus
/10  4 years ago
Vice (2018)

Direction: 8/10

Filmmaking: 7.5/10

Story: 8/10

Acting: 9.5/10

Entertainment: 8/10

Musical Score: 9/10

Final Grade: 8.3/10

Standout Performance: Christian Bale

Summary: Vice rises up against many of its competitors in the American Political genre of film as Director Adam McKay delivers a very informative, dramatic, and what I can assume to be as accurate as possible tale of Vice President Dick Cheney, and the George W. Bush administration.
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Stephen Campbell
/10  5 years ago
**_Pretty enjoyable, very funny, but doesn't tell us anything we didn't already know_**

> _We have guaranteed freedom, security, and peace for a larger share of humanity than has any other nation in all of history. There is no other like us. There never has been. We are, as a matter of empirical fact and undeniable history, the greatest force for good the world has ever known._

- Dick Cheney; _Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America_ (2015)

As a non-American, I've always been fascinated by the concept of a two party system. Breeding rancour and division by its very nature, with only two sides from which to choose on any issue, the more controversial a subject is, the wider the ideological gap becomes. I'm not sure if it's a cause or a symptom, but intricately intertwined with such deep-rooted partisanship is the fact that everyone seems to be preaching to their own choir; Republicans have Sean Hannity, Tucker Carlson, and Ben Shapiro (and Alex Jones), whilst Democrats have Bill Maher, Anderson Cooper, and Chris Cuomo (and Cenk Uygar). The problem is that the people watching _Fox and Friends_ and reading _Breitbart_ are already staunchly on the right, whilst those watching CNN and reading _The New York Times_ are already firmly on the left; everyone is sermonising to the already converted, and no one is listening to what the other camp is saying. Written and directed by Adam McKay, _Vice_ is a good example of this; it's a left-leaning film made by left-leaning people for a left-leaning audience. When McKay was asked by the _ACLU_ if he had any theories as to why Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump allegedly walked out of a screening, his response was telling; "_I think the bigger question is: Why did they buy two tickets and walk in?_"

Ostensibly a biopic of former Vice President Dick Cheney, _Vice_ argues that he was actually the _de facto_ President, with George W. Bush taking a back seat, particularly in the globally crucial years from 2001-2003. Very much a political satire in the vein of Decimus Iunius Iuvenalis and Jonathan Swift, or films such as Barry Levinson's _Wag the Dog_ and Joe Dante's _The Second Civil War_ (both 1997), _Vice_ eschews conventional narrative structure, breaks the fourth wall regularly, intercuts shots of fly-fishing and animals hunting into the middle of tense plot-heavy dialogue scenes, features several self-reflexive references to itself, has a false ending, has a scene in which characters speak in iambic pentameter, and in a deleted scene, the entire cast breaks into song. Much as was the case with recent "based on a true story" films such as Spike Lee's _BlacKkKlansman_ and Jason Reitman's _The Front Runner_ (both 2018), _Vice_ has one eye on the here and now, using Cheney's story as a vehicle to examine the current political situation in the US, positing that without the power-mad Dick Cheney and the Unitary Executive Theory, there would never have been a Donald Trump. However, although there are many individual moments of brilliance, the film is unsure if it's a straightforward biopic or an excoriating satire, ultimately finding a kind of ideological middle ground that mixes comedy with pathos, not always successfully.

Narrated by Kurt (Jesse Plemons), a fictitious veteran of the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, who claims to have a unique connection to Cheney, the film begins in Wyoming in 1963 as a young Dick Cheney (Christian Bale) is arrested for drunk driving for the second time. It then cuts to the Presidential Emergency Operations Center in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, as Cheney orders the shooting down of any suspicious commercial airliners, despite President Bush (who was en route to Washington from Florida) not signing off on such an order. How Cheney got from being a drunk in 1963 to taking control of the government in 2001 is the film's primary focus, introducing us to a huge cast of characters (played by an extraordinary ensemble), all of whom feature in Cheney's rise to power in some manner – Lynne Vincent (Amy Adams), Cheney's fiancée and later wife; Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), under whom Cheney worked from 1969, later White House Chief of Staff (1970-1971) and Secretary of Defense (1975-1977 and 2001-2006); Gerald Ford (Bill Camp), President (1974-1977), for whom Cheney was White House Chief of Staff; George H.W. Bush (John Hillner), President (1989-1993), for whom Cheney was Secretary for Defense; Liz (Lily Rabe) and Mary (Allison Pill), Cheney's two daughters; Roger Ailes (Kyle S. More), founder of Fox News; George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell), President (2001-2009), for whom Cheney was Vice President; Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk), Chief of Staff to the Vice President (2001-2005); David Addington (Don McManus), Cheney's legal counsel (2001-2005) and Chief of Staff to the Vice President (2005-2009); Colin Powell (Tyler Perry), Secretary of State (2001-2005); Condoleezza Rice (LiaGay Hamilton), National Security Advisor (2001-2005) and Secretary of State (2005-2009); Paul Wolfowitz (Eddie Marsan), Deputy Secretary of Defense (2001-2005); George Tenet (Stephen Adly Guirgis), Director of Central Intelligence (1996-2004); Karl Rove (Joseph Beck), Senior Advisor to the President (2001-2007); Trent Lott (Paul Perri), Senate Minority Leader (2001-2003); Jay Bybee (Brandon Firla), Assistant Attorney General (2001-2003); and John Yoo (Paul Yoo) Deputy Assistant Attorney General (2001-2003). Within this framework, the film hits all the beats you'd expect – the bombing of Cambodia (1969-1970); the formation of Al-Qaeda (1988); the outbreak of the Somali Civil War (1988); the invasion of Panama (1989); the Gulf War (1990-1991); Cheney's time as CEO of Halliburton (1995-2000); 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan (2001); the "Torture Memos" and "enhanced interrogation techniques" (2002); the invasion of Iraq (2003); the Plame affair (2003); the accidental shooting of Harry Whittington (2006); the rise of IS; Cheney's 13% approval rating upon leaving office (2009); his heart transplant (2012); and the breakdown in Mary's relationship with her family when Cheney gives Liz permission to oppose gay marriage whilst running for the Senate, despite Mary being a married to a woman (2013).

In writing Vice, McKay focused on five main sources – David Corn's _The Lies of George W. Bush: Mastering the Politics of Deception_ (2003), Ron Suskind's _The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11_ (2006), Michael Isikoff and David Corn's _Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War_ (2006), Barton Gellman's _Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency_ (2008), and Jane Mayer's _The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals_ (2008).

_Vice_ presents Cheney as devoid of ideology, with a Zelig-esque ability to alter his manner so as to best deal with whomever it is in whose company he finds himself. In this sense, his political ambition is portrayed as cynical and mercenary; McKay's Cheney has no interest in attaining power so as to influence policy or stimulate ideological change, he is obsessed only with power-for-power's sake. One of the most telling scenes in the film happens quite early when he learns that President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger are planning to bomb Cambodia without going through Congress. Asking Rumsfeld, "_what do we believe?_", he is met by Rumsfeld laughing hysterically at being asked such a ridiculous question. Speaking to The New Yorker, McKay explains,

> _what I found – and I know there are people who disagree with this – was a surprising lack of ideology. I found beliefs that would flip and flop, based on what was convenient and what was strategically useful._

However, although the film presents Cheney as lacking ideology, it does show him as passionate when he adopts (and later usurps) the Unitary Executive Theory (essentially, the idea that the President should have virtually unchecked power to direct the Executive Branch, particularly during times of crisis). McKay tells _The New Yorker_,

> _at one point, he even says the President should have certain monarchical prerogatives._

Speaking to _ACLU_, he says of Cheney's adoption of the Theory,

> _you see it constantly throughout his career – his attempts to expand executive reach, expand executive authority, to operate without transparency, to operate with impunity._

Key lines in this respect include Cheney arguing, "_if the president does it, it's legal_", and, when discussing the issue of the US using torture, "_if the US does it, by definition, it can't be torture_".

Nowhere is his character shown as more ruthless than in a scene towards the end of the film. In 2013, Liz is running for the Senate when a TV advert from a group affiliated with the incumbent Senator for Wyoming, Mike Enzi, claimed that she "_aggressively promotes gay marriage_". Mary had been married to Heather Poe since 2012, and although Cheney and Liz knew it went against their party's doctrines, they had supported her. However, the day after the advert aired, Liz appeared on _Fox News Sunday_ and said she did not support gay marriage. The following day, Cheney and Lynne released a statement supporting Liz, and causing a rift between the family and Mary which remains to this day. The film features a scene the night before Liz goes on TV, in which she asks permission to say she opposes gay marriage. In a chilling moment lifted right out of Francis Ford Coppola's _The Godfather Part II_ (1974), Cheney indicates his approval with a single silent nod of his head. Speaking to _ACLU_ about this scene, McKay states,

> _that to me is what made it a complete and total tragedy and that's the final kind of tally, the final destructive count of power. Is what he did to the country, what he did to countries like Iraq, punching holes in the Geneva Convention, what he did to the checks and balances of our democracy, what he did to the spirit of the American voter, the spirit of the American nation. And then the final thing, the tools that he used_ […] _eventually took down his own family. So to me at that point the tragedy was complete on every level: personal, family, country, world._

Much as in _BlacKkKlansman_, _Vice_ concludes with a haunting montage that brings the story up to date, showing some of the long-term effects of the Bush-Cheney years (instability in the Middle East, irreparable damage to the environment, the rise of IS). In relation to the here and now, although Trump is never explicitly mentioned (and is only shown for a split second in archive footage), McKay is unafraid to admit that the film is not entirely focused on the past. Speaking to the _New York Times_ about Cheney's dismantling of executive checks on power, McKay states,

> _Cheney was the expert safecracker who opened up the safe, and now the orangutan is in there, throwing around the money and the jewels._

He also sees the film as something of a corrective, a reminder of just how bad it was during Bush's time in office, telling _ACLU_

> _somewhere along the line, Donald Trump got elected, and all of a sudden we started hearing people say, "Hey, I kind of miss George W. Bush. You know, he wasn't that bad, him and Cheney." And then I really felt like I got to make the movie. I was like, this is crazy that people are saying this._

As with McKay's previous film, _The Big Short_ (2015), _Vice_ is aesthetically audacious. While there are fewer self-reflexive celebratory cameos explaining difficult terminology in direct-to-camera monologues (sadly, there's no Margot Robbie in a bath this time around), the film is edited in such a way as to remind me of Oliver Stone's "horizontal editing" in films such as _JFK_ (1991), _Natural Born Killers_ (1994), _Nixon_ (1995), and _U-Turn_ (1997). It's no coincidence that Vice was cut by Hank Corwin, who cut all of the above except _JFK_. This style of hyperkinetic editing can be seen throughout the film. For example, as Chaney attempts to manipulate Bush into agreeing to give him more power, there are intercepts of fly-fishing. It's not subtle, but it is effective. Indeed, this recalls an earlier scene when Cheney is teaching his daughters to fish, explaining,

> _you have to find out what the fish wants, and then you use that to catch the fish._

Elsewhere, much as Stone uses Coke commercials and footage from old films in _Natural Born Killers_, Vice features excerpts from the Budweiser "Whassup?" commercial (1999) and _Survivor_. In another scene, when Cheney first learns of the Unitary Executive Theory from Antonin Scalia (Matthew Jacobs), he immediately realises it is his road to power, and the film cuts to a lion bringing down a gazelle. For me though, some of the most effective editing in the film is more conventional. One particularly strong example is as Bush declares war on Iraq, the camera tilts down to show his leg is shaking. The film then cuts to a shot of an Iraqi civilian's leg shaking as the bombs begin to drop.

Also similar to _The Big Short_ is the film's sense of humour, with a tone of irreverence established from the very beginning, as the opening legend states,

> _the following is a true story. Or as true as it can be given that Dick Cheney is known as one of the most secretive leaders in recent history. But we did our fucking best._

A particularly sardonic scene comes about an hour in, as the film shows Cheney stepping away from politics in 1993 and later turning down Bush when he asks him to be his running mate in 2000. At this point, the legend explains that Cheney had chosen his family over politics, and that he happily lived out his days in Wyoming, becoming known as a great philanthropist and fly fisherman. As the Cheneys gather around a family barbeque, triumphant music swells, and the closing credits start to roll, only for the movie to interrupt itself, pointing out that that's not what happened at all, and then continuing with the narrative. It's a very meta technique, and one which both mocks feel-good biopics, whilst also providing a sly criticism of Cheney himself – had he not returned in 2000, the world could have had this happy ending.

Another very funny sequence sees Cheney and Lynne in bed discussing whether or not he should accept Bush's offer, with the narrator explaining,

> _sadly there is no real way to know exactly what was going on with the Cheneys at this history-changing moment. We can't just snap into a Shakespearean soliloquy that dramatises every feeling and emotion. That's just not the way the world works._

This is immediately followed by Cheney and Lynne speaking in _faux_-Shakespearean blank verse ("_Hast blindness usurped vision in you my wife?_", "_Mine own blood and will are yours til pierc'd be the last soldier's breastplate, spilling open its jellied ruby treasures_") as they work themselves up into a sexual frenzy (although technically, this is a duologue, not a soliloquy). There is also a scene in which Cheney meets two oil executives, whose faces are blurred out, and whose names are bleeped every time they are spoken. In another scene, a waiter (Alfred Molina), reads from a menu that features various forms of Cheney-endorsed torture;

> _tonight, we're offering the enemy combatant, whereby a person is not a prisoner of war, or a criminal, which means, of course, that he has absolutely no protection under the law._

After listening to their options, Cheney gleefully declares, "_we'll take it all_". There is also a hilarious mid-credit scene, which sees a focus group descend into chaos when a conservative calls a liberal a "_libtard_", prompting a mass brawl. Ignoring the fight, however, are two young girls who are instead interested only in speculating as to the quality of the new _Fast & the Furious_ film.

For all that, however, _Vice_ isn't a patch on _The Big Short_, for a number of reasons. For example, whereas in _The Big Short_, the self-reflexive _Tristram Shandy_-style narrative structure worked to the film's advantage, providing a way into the complex story, here it has the exact opposite effect, oftentimes distracting from McKay's thematic concerns, preventing the film from focusing on telling us how (and why) Cheney exploited loopholes in executive power to restructure US foreign policy. McKay is also less successful at moving from scenes of quiet tragedy to scenes of comedy than he was in _The Big Short_.

The most egregious problem, however, is that the film fails to give any kind of psychological verisimilitude or interiority to Cheney. Presenting him in an almost robotic manner, there is very little on what drives him, depicting his various deeds without offering anything cogent in terms of his motivations. Is he simply an ideologically-weak opportunist? Is he an evil megalomaniac fuelled by a deeper purpose, and if so, what purpose, and how? Could it all really have been about power, viewing the global geopolitical sphere as his own personal playground and nothing more? And if the film is arguing this, suggesting that this man, responsible for so much pain and suffering, did it all simply because he liked power, isn't that to downplay his agency, to allow one to argue that he didn't really know how much damage he was causing? Depriving him of psychology weakens any attempt to censure his actions. The film's Cheney is ultimately unknowable, and that makes his acts more easily forgivable. The argument that it was all because of power and greed really does next-to-nothing to help explain the man. And in any case, if we accept the thesis that Cheney cared only for power, then surely he warrants serious moral scrutiny, not a self-reflexive and, at times, self-congratulatory narrative that assumes the audience agrees with it before it has even said anything.

_Vice_ traces all of Cheney's acts back to Lynne dressing him down when he was younger, suggesting that without her prodding, this unambitious two-time Yale dropout would never have gotten into politics in the first place (it's telling, perhaps, that Lynne is unenthusiastic when she learns Cheney is thinking of accepting Bush's offer to be his running mate, pointing out, "_the VP just sits around and waits for the president to die_"). But to reduce all of it to being told off by wife, seems far too easy, although it could, I suppose, be cited as an example of the banality of evil. Except that the film's Cheney is anything but banal. In fact, he's terrifying.

Cheney pressured the CIA to find links between Al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein so as to justify invading Iraq. He oversaw the public relations campaign to build popular support for the war. He encouraged the torture of terror suspects all the while denying it was torture. He was responsible for the worst strategic blunder in US history, the growth of a domestic surveillance state, the dictatorialisation of the office of the President, and the deaths of 4,000 American troops and at least 100,000 Iraqi civilians, although possibly as many as 500,000. His contempt for and willingness to rewrite the rule of law makes him a precursor of Trump. Positing him as a man who was power-mad and little else, _Vice_ remains always on the outside, trying to listen through the wall, never managing to open the door and expose his actual inner workings. The comedy and structural experimentation make it entertaining as a film, but it tells us very little about Cheney that we didn't already know. Strip away the artifice, and you'll find it doesn't have a huge amount to say. Never attaining the scale of tragedy to which it clearly aspires, the film functions instead to remind critics of Bush's cabinet why they became critics of Bush's cabinet. In the end, rather than exposing Cheney's dark soul, the film argues that he doesn't have one. And that is a far less interesting thesis.
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Gimly
/10  5 years ago
Being Australian and under 30, Dick Cheney is not someone I ever payed a lot of attention to. I knew he shot that dude and the dude he shot is the one who had to apologise somehow, and that he was one of the evil puppet-master types who stood behind George W. That's it. So while Cheney as a subject matter isn't something I can say I **care** about, it's also not material that's old hat to me either. I ended up watching it only because that's what my mate wanted to do for his birthday, but I'm glad I did. I did not **love** _Vice_, but for the sort of thing I don't normally gravitate towards, I was riveted.

_Final rating:★★★ - I liked it. Would personally recommend you give it a go._
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