Vice

VICE   ***

Adam McKay

2018

IDEA:  A portrait of Dick Cheney as he made his monstrous ascent from Chief of Staff to Vice President.

BLURB:  Less a political satire than a furious, stomach-turning dissection of governmental tyranny, Vice lays bare the decades worth of destruction inflicted by the GOP upon the US and the world. Tracing the party’s noxious stranglehold back to the Nixon years when Dick Cheney entered Washington as a feckless intern, McKay illustrates how the future vice president perpetuated and came to embody an ethos of corruption, amorality, fear-mongering, and avarice that has only become more entrenched in the White House in the intervening years. For McKay, Cheney is a kind of skeleton key to unlock the heinousness of what the GOP now proudly represents, and if he doesn’t quite posit him as the sole architect of its disastrously harmful evolution, he recognizes in him the ur-form of the essential soullessness that his cronies and successors would faithfully replicate. Christian Bale, in a truly uncanny performance, oozes with the barely concealed disdain and calculated sociopathy of a man fully aware of, and indifferent to, the damage he’s causing for his own gain. His distinctly pungent portrayal, along with the film’s frequent, sudden cuts to familiarly tragic current events, infuse Vice with a rare dread that tightens over its course like a noose. Even McKay’s explicitly comic scenarios are tempered by an awful recognition of the realities they satirize, denying the audience the catharsis of untroubled laughter. Vice does not boast the most elegant, or nuanced, or disciplined filmmaking. But as a work of scathing agitprop, its confrontational bluntness and refusal of comforting concessions make for not only invigorating protest, but a necessarily rude wakeup call.