Release Date: December 25, 2018
Director: Adam McKay
MPAA Rating: R
Run Time: 132 Minutes
Adam McKay’s first foray into biographical comedy came to us in 2015 with The Big Short, a cracking ensemble piece about the 2008 housing market collapse that earned five academy award nominations, including a win for Best Adapted Screenplay. Now, McKay is back in the political hot seat with Vice, the story of perhaps the most influential and ruthless vice presidents we’ve ever had, Dick Cheney.
Christian Bale plays Cheney in a casting choice that, at first thought, may seem slightly perfunctory, given the little aesthetic similarities between the two men. But Bale, with the aid of some prosthetics, somehow transforms into the Batman-villain-esque persona of Cheney with a natural grace, embodying his cadence and mannerisms to a T.
McKay opens the film stating that everything we’re about to see is as true as they could make it, a necessary preamble to a film that, just like The Big Short, seems entirely too comically ridiculous to be true. We see a drunken, younger Cheney swerving lane to lane while speeding down a lonely Midwestern road before getting pulled over and arrested by a trooper. It’s a stark contrast to the always composed, stone-faced leader that we would all know several decades later.
We float through Cheney’s life, from his relationship with his wife, Lynne – played by the always incredible Amy Adams – to his internship under the foul-mouthed sleeze Donald Rumsfeld (Steve Carell) to, finally, his position as “veep” under George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell, in an expert piece of casting).
Like The Big Short, McKay periodically pulls back from Cheney’s narrative to give audiences additional context on his actions and the state of the country as a whole, frequently obliterating the fourth wall and turning the film into something of a satirical documentary.
Narrator Jesse Plemons’ character appears only briefly, but when he does, it makes for the most impactful moment of the film, one that briefly strips away the comedy of it all and delivers an absolute gut-punch, reminding us why Cheney left office with an approval rating of 13%.
While it may not paint the most flattering picture of Cheney or his colleagues, Vice portrays the human side of the man, something most of us have never seen prior, though, at most, it only shows that he’s a sentient person capable of emotion. His self-serving nature and power-hungry ego prevented him from being much more than a devilishly cunning politician who knew how to play the bureaucratic game of the United States’ government better than anyone else.
Bolstered by award-worthy performances from its powerhouse cast, Vice is an astoundingly funny, entertaining and revelatory look at one of the least funny and entertaining people to ever enter U.S. politics. It’s only a matter of time before we see McKay tackle our current presidential situation, and I’ll be sitting the front row, ready with my popcorn in hand.
I have just seen this brilliant movie, and it reminded me how much I despise Cheney, Bush, Blair and all the other overprivileged armchair generals who sent the sons of the great unwashed off to die for a pack of lies and leave the middle east in flames. Buck Millican sums up my feelings in Alun Wessler’s monumental tome ‘Odysseus’:
“Letter from Sambuca Millican to the South China Morning Post of 8 July 2016, unpublished through lack of interest, so later posted on Facebook to at least reach several score friends and acquaintances:
I am absolutely sick of people in the media being taken in by Tony Blair’s crocodile tears and Machiavellian word games, and then encouraging us to take a balanced and moderate view of his role in the Iraq war. If you are not clinically insane or a certified moron, you cannot deny the basic facts below, which are supported by the Chilcot report.
For months, Tony Blair followed George Bush around like a devoted underling (I don’t want to use expressions like ‘poodle’ or ‘clingy girlfriend’ because I am striving to be objective and factual), averring that he would be “with you whatever”, presumably no matter how wicked or moronic the Americans’ plans were. At the same time, Blair led the British people to believe that he was seeking a multilateral compromise to avoid military action.
Blair and his cronies compiled a heavily biased dossier of unreliable intelligence on the imminent threat posed to the west by Saddam Hussein, and then presented it to parliament as a powerful or near-irresistible casus belli. This can only be a case of either criminal dishonesty or criminal negligence. There is no third explanation.
Then Blair sent the children of the lower orders off to war and into lethal danger, without the appropriate planning or equipment to keep them safe. At the same time, he and George Bush had come up with no proper or even sensible ideas on how they were going to administer a post-invasion Iraq to prevent it from turning into a toxic maelstrom of deadly mayhem. As a result, 179 British service personnel and at least 100,000 Iraqis died in the aftermath.
I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know which legal books I should consult to find the definition of a war crime. However, just a cursory one-minute look on the Internet produces this quote from Wikipedia: ‘A war of aggression, sometimes also a war of conquest, is a military conflict waged without the justification of self-defense,…..Since the Korean War of the early 1950s, waging such a war of aggression is a crime under the customary international law.’ The Chilcot report states that ‘Blair deliberately exaggerated the threat posed by the Iraqi regime’. Blair knew the the UK was not under threat, and so he was clearly not acting in self defence.
Maybe there are some legal experts out there reading this comment. Would any of you like to advise me how I could bring a private prosecution against Blair for war crimes, or perhaps join me in taking such action?”