Vice (2018)

Cast includes:
CHARACTER	ACTOR/ACTRESS	RATING
Dick Cheney	Christian Bale	½
Lynne Cheney	Amy Adams	½
Donald Rumsfeld	Steve Carell	½
George W. Bush	Sam Rockwell
Colin Powell	Tyler Perry
Mary Cheney	Alison Pill
Liz Cheney	Lily Rabe
Paul Wolfowitz	Eddie Marsan
Scooter Libby	Justin Kirk
Condoleezza Rice	LisaGay Hamilton
Kurt, the narrator	Jesse Plemons
Gerald Ford	Bill Camp
David Addington	Don McManus
Wayne Vincent	Shea Whigham

Review

Vice, which is Adam McKay's follow-up to The Big Short, is not about a police division, but rather about the life and times of former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney. It's a fairly standard biopic in form, spiced up with some stylistic touches which make an otherwise dry account about political positioning and administrative work quite entertaining. However, it also makes the film more akin to political satires in the vein of Wag the Dog than to the more serious biopic genre. The problem this choice of angle poses is that while it gives the film more zest, it also casts a shadow on whether the filmmakers have been unbiased enough in their work. Because Cheney and his family are portrayed in such an unsympathetic manner here that the events unfolding are almost unbelievable the way that they are presented. Vice paints a caricatured picture of modern politics, which may sound like a pleonasm in and of itself, but it arguably would have been meritable for McKay to be a little more subtle in his approach. The result would probably also be a less divisive movie, if that is something anyone making a political film would be interested in achieving in today's climate. Nevertheless, there still is a fun and clever movie somewhere inside these 132 minutes, not least thanks to Christian Bale's eerily accurate imitation of Cheney and Amy Adams' horror-film-like portrayal of Cheney's wife Lynne.