Vice (Adam McKay, 2018)
A complete failure. Never knows if it wants to be a farcical meta-satire or an angry political biopic, a film about the Iraq War specifically or about Dick Cheney... it also views history in a way that I personally detest, exagerrating the influence of one man to a completely laughable degree... I mean, I'm pretty sure this film makes a direct connectino between the recent California fires and Dick Cheney, which, okay, climate change* and Halliburton can certainly be connected, but I think we can all agree that this particular evil lays at other people's feet than Dick Cheney's. There's also the weirdness of the heart transplant thing, which seems to imply that bad people shouldn't be treated medically ? I mean, that is an ethical question you can ask I suppose, but this film seems to straight up argue that you should not be an organ donor... thanks, Adam McKay ! Also, the whole thing with his family which seems like a very Fox News way to appear "Fair and Balanced" until it's revealed to be yet another way to belabor the point of Cheney's awfulness. I mean he is awful, fine, but the film has nothing to say other than "everything bad with the world is this guy's fault." Which is not how the world works.
Christian Bale is awful in the young Cheney scenes. In the 2000s scenes, he does a passable impression. Rockwell is fine, it's not his fault the film is written like a bad episode of the Daily Show (the actual reference in my head is Les Guignols, but that wouldn't mean much to most of you here), and Amy Adams is actually good, somehow.
*which is a much better way of describing the phenomenon than "global warming", btw, and not because it's "less scary".
2/10