Review of Vice (2018) by Dustin D — 27 Dec 2018

Vice was everything I was expecting it to be, while not being as good as I'd hoped it would be, which is why I give it a lukewarm positive rating. First the positives. It is very entertaining. The storytelling is bold and original. Christian Bale transforms into Dick Cheney and is completely believable. Steve Carell is especially good as Donald Rumsfeld.

The narrative is told much in the same style as McKay's The Big Short, but frankly not done as well, and tonally not really appropriate for this story. The movie shows events from Dick Cheney's life before he was VP--failing out of Yale, becoming a downwardly mobile drunk, cleaning up his act, graduating from State U, interning with Rumsfeld, working in the Nixon, then Ford White House. While interesting, McKay doesn't quite connect the dots. We don't ever really learn what makes Dick Cheney tick. We don't learn anything we didn't already know about him.

I find it interesting Hollywood seems to have come to a consensus Republicans are evil, while Democrats are basically good. While I went in knowing this would be a one-sided picture (I don't really think there are two sides to Dick Cheney), I'm not sure it's fair to place all of America's current ills at Cheney's feet. So what was the point of this movie? Was it to demonstrate the dangers of allowing a cynical opportunist into the White House? (Is there an obvious parallel I'm missing here?).