Critics reviews

McKay’s original manoeuvre is to make a film that is structurally a comedy while being narratively a drama. . . . These effects create jarring moments in a film that is otherwise a West Wing-style behind the scenes depiction of Cheney’s DC machinations. But the film is most let down, precisely, on the level of its political analysis.

A movie by Adam McKay, who made The Big Short and various beloved Will Ferrell comedies, should be better than an Oliver Stone biopic, and Vice is not. It should be a slam-dunk, not a highlight reel. McKay has done the unthinkable: botched a takedown of Dick Cheney, a man who shot his friend in the face and then made him apologize.

The man at its center deserves the scrutiny of a more thoughtful, serious, or, frankly, competent biographer. In every possible sense, this movie fails to live up to its burden to history.

McKay suggests we look again; that where the historical machinery of power appears its calmest is, in fact, the eye of the storm. Vice argues that Cheney’s methodical and relatively frictionless ascent to the heights of stature and influence is best examined and understood through the prism of the disarray it portends.

Vice is a bad movie about a very bad person. Because Adam McKay's film is sharply critical of its subject does not make it a good movie. It is obvious, clumsy, admittedly sporadically entertaining, but most of all, bizarrely incongruous, its many moveable parts shoehorned into a film that as a whole is barely coherent.

If Cheney were seen purely as an oil-industry functionary, albeit one with neocon delusions, his gloss would be dulled, and his reign would become more intelligible for what it was: just another milestone on the Republican-led marathon to the bottom.

The impersonations in Vice are often inspired, and they could have supported major performances if the script had included dialogue of any substance.

While McKay’s conviction that very simple cause-and-effect explanations exist behind the expert language of government doesn’t necessarily diminish his work as a polemicist, he is hobbled as an artist by the fact that the same simplicity—simplemindedness, even—governs his dramaturgy and depiction of human relations.

McKay bitterly and sometimes cartoonishly illustrates a half century of grim headlines with some incisive details, but he treats politics like Hollywood infighting, reducing ideological justifications of cruel misrule to matters of self-interest and personal conflict.

McKay’s manic style shifting mainly serves an emotional purpose: It’s meant to whip the audience into a froth of anger at the cynical opportunism of the Bush years. Unfortunately, that effort often undermines Vice’s other, less successful project: to provide insight into the biographical motivations of Dick Cheney.

To prepare for Vice, McKay reportedly read some very good books about Cheney (Barton Gellman’s Angler) and the war on terror (Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side), but his own grasp of Washington politics is thin, and his understanding of power and how it works hews to what V.I. Lenin denounced as “infantile leftism.”

It’s hard to know whether this represents hypocrisy or penitence on McKay’s part, but the idea that someone can’t care about both politics and popular culture is dubious at best. At worst, it’s a sneer directed at the audience, an expression of contempt for the public that the movie seems to share with its designated villain.