![]() It’s a challenge that the film seriously embraces over the course of two hours, but it does so in the humorous spirit of Swift and Voltaire, or perhaps the likes of Terry Southern and Gore Vidal if you prefer a more recent era the surface treatment can seem prankish and outrageous, but beneath the foolishness lies grave consequence. McKay thus poses his central question: How the hell did this two-time Yale dropout make the jump from nonentity to string-pulling power behind the throne? Cut to 9/11, when then-Vice President Cheney assumes total power over the government in the temporary absence of the president. The first we see of Dick Cheney is as a drunken 22-year-old wastrel in 1963 Wyoming, a kid who could arguably benefit from the discipline instilled by a stint in the armed forces (he never did serve). ![]() The opening minutes boldly announce McKay’s ambitious agenda. ![]() This feels like a zeitgeist event that has its finger on the public pulse and its thumb firmly up the rear of its subject. But fortunately, this film is not Saturday Night Live-style mockery designed merely to score easy political points but, rather, deep dish satire of the sort that is in generally short supply beyond that, it illuminates how the track was laid to help us arrive at where we are today. One immediate benefit of the film will be to give the Trump-obsessed media someone else to hammer for a while. Trim Christian Bale brilliantly morphs into the potato-ish frame of Dick Cheney in a nervy high-wire act of a film that relates, with merciless humor, the odyssey of a thoroughly unpromising young man who slowly but surely thrust greatness (in his own mind) upon himself by shrewdly playing his cards over several decades. There’s smart, there’s wicked smart and then there’s Adam McKay smart - the latter of which is on full display in Vice, a scorchingly audacious and dark tragicomedy about the man who, the film argues, became the most powerful and dangerous vice president in the history of the nation.
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