Went to see the Dick Chaney bio-pic Vice…. and with a title like Vice (and not, say, Vice President), you can probably imagine that this isn’t a positive portrayal of the ex-VP. That’s an accurate stance… you might even call it a hit-piece.
Vice stars Christian Bale in a ton of makeup to make himself look uncannily like Chaney. But even without all the makeup and gray hair, Bale does a pretty good impersonation of the gruff, snarky, maybe even sneering man. Amy Adams plays Lynne Chaney, Steve Carrell is Don Rumsfeld, Sam Rockwell is W, and Tyler Perry plays a less-convincing Colin Powell. It’s a good cast doing good work.
But the movie… well, the movie certainly has an opinion. If you are a Bush/Chaney fan, you’ll hate the movie for being the hit-piece it is. If you aren’t a fan, then have fun in the echo chamber of ideas. The movie isn’t to be taken seriously, regardless of how accurate it is. It’s too opinionated and too far to the left to trust the accuracy of what it is saying. I’m not saying its accurate or not, but what it is is too one-sided to believe anything.
Given that, is it any good as a film? Well, it IS well acted… but it kind of tries to cover too much material and doesn’t offer connective tissue between a lot of it. For example, they cover the time Chaney shot his hunting pal in the face… but it comes out of nowhere, points out he never apologized, and moves on. No context otherwise. It does this a lot, especially near the end of the film. Which is why I call it a hit-piece… not because I have a great love for Dick Chaney, but because it became too obvious the film makers loath the guy.
It was written and directed by Adam McKay who made the creative and energetic The Big Short, a film that inventively made the housing collapse entertaining. McKay tries some of the same tricks in this film but it doesn’t work as well. His random asides that worked to explain more complicated financial ideas in Big Short don’t serve him well in this film. And there’s room to go into more detail but I think the film doesn’t want to cover the nuance of the story.
So… yeah this is an uneven film that is anything but subtle. It’s well acted and well produced. But it won’t teach anyone anything – the right will hate it for its sneer, the left will love it for its sneer.
Score: 80