'VICE' Is a Scathing Takedown of Dick Cheney and American Politics

Adam McKay's new movie about the Dubya era will leave you angry (and in need of a drink)

The opening scene in VICE—Adam McKay’s new movie in which Christian Bale becomes Dick Cheney—takes place on a country road in Wyoming after sundown. It’s the late 1960s. We’re following a car as it fishtails toward the blackened mountain skyline. Cheney, young, working as a utility pole repairman, is behind the wheel, piss-drunk.

The tone here is unnerving—the scene plays like a passage into Hades. It’s a note-perfect opener. Because contrary to what you may have heard, VICE is not just a Cheney biopic from the team that made The Big Short. VICE is a two hour evisceration of America’s political system—a system that allowed Cheney to metastasize from an observant power-hungry DC intern into a monstrous politician who destroyed Iraq so America could broker access to its oilfields.


It’s like Apocalypse Now, except we’re not in Cambodia (though we do see it get bombed at one point). This time, Cheney is our Willard, guiding us into the White House, the Pentagon, and the manicured estates where politicians sip Coors and go fly fishing. The film also takes us into fetid rooms where Iraqi and Afghan civilians are being tortured to fulfill the blood-soaked foreign policies that Cheney and his Ivy League-educated accomplices inflicted upon the world.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59venn/vice-is-a-scathing-takedown-of-dick-cheney-and-american-politics

The best compliment that can be paid to VICE is that it’s the closest thing to justice that Cheney has faced yet. Just like The Big Short presented audiences with the cruelty of what the big banks did to the American people, VICE is a scathing memento of Cheney’s impact on American democracy, and how our political system, by design, rewards power-hungry men like him. Like The Big Short’s apocalyptic ending, the dark resolution of VICE will leave moviegoers not only angry and depressed, but asking each other, “What can we do about this?”
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Thumbs up from me tonight and Bale is a good Cheney plus we were with a great audience here
Yes a lot to be pissed off at and not just Cheney . For some reason a Reagan scene really irked me
Also interesting that Will Ferrell is one of the producers of Vice and this movie is competing at the box office with his Holmes & Watson movie .
Also one of the stars, Steve Carrell is the lead in another movie , Welcome to Marwan which was just released and competing for holiday week ticket sales
All three were showing at the same multiplex tonight