McKay’s wacky structural alienation-effects and meta gags are more pertinent here, and the dialogue is far more smoothly managed: there is a nice fantasy scene in which Cheney and his formidable wife Lynne (played by Amy Adams) switch into Shakespearean dialogue, as a comment on the laconic, tongue-tied nature of real life. But the stylised inserts reminded me a bit more worryingly of his previous film, the bafflingly overrated The Big Short from 2015, a pseudo-satire of the financial world that tried to confer underdog-hero status on those money men who’d done well out of the crash. Vice is a kind of PowerPoint biopic, a Ted talk of a comedy, with fourth-wall breaks and voiceover routines borrowed from Michael Moore. Could it be that there is a surge of liberal nostalgia for a time when Republican bad guys, however horrible, were at least smart and rational people who had the good taste to stay out of the limelight personally, and you sort of knew where you stood with them? This film has had a surge of awards season love.
Cheney’s final treatment of her in this movie made me think of Citizen Kane setting fire to his childhood sled and saying he never liked winter-sports equipment named after flowers anyway. Vice is always entertaining and nihilist, especially when it comes to Cheney’s relationship with his beloved daughter Mary Cheney (Alison Pill), an out gay woman and same-sex marriage campaigner. This is due to a terrifically and in fact rather scarily plausible impersonation from Christian Bale, whose head has been enlarged to the size of a pale-pink bespectacled beach ball atop a shapeless, conservatively suited fleshmound. Or perhaps it’s truer to say that it’s at Cheney’s massive ear where notional power squats in the form of former president George W Bush.
The former US vice-president, big oil nabob and waterboarding enthusiast Dick Cheney squats like a latex, inflated toad at the ear of power in this flashy political comedy from Adam McKay.
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