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Christian Bale's transformation into Dick Cheney is complete in Vice

Vice . Directed by Adam McKay. Starring Christian Bale and Amy Adams. Rating: 4 (out of 10) Just about the only consensus to be found in the maelstrom surrounding Adam McKay’s Vice is the startling transformation of Christian Bale into Dick Cheney.
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Vice. Directed by Adam McKay. Starring Christian Bale and Amy Adams. Rating: 4 (out of 10)

Just about the only consensus to be found in the maelstrom surrounding Adam McKay’s Vice is the startling transformation of Christian Bale into Dick Cheney.

 The prosthetics, Bale’s weight gain, and his canny imitation of the Halliburton CEO-turned-instigator-of-the-Iraq-War is an impressive feat by any standards.

Beyond that the divide begins, including whether or not director Adam McKay could decide if his film was a comedy or a scathing indictment of the political treachery that spanned its subject’s five heart attacks and two Bush administrations.

 It’s an expansion of the technique employed in McKay’s 2015 film The Big Short, using intermittent comedy to underscore how the shady dealings of a corrupt few affect us all. Perhaps without these moments to provide a break in the blatant corruption, McKay feels his audience would resort to hurling things (or themselves) at the screen? Or maybe he doesn’t trust his viewers to understand the intricacies of “our government, lobbying … or tax bills,” something he suggests outright at the beginning of the film.

 Frustration is certainly the least of the negative feelings invoked while watching the dealings between Cheney and George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell), whether conducted at the Crawford ranch or in the White House. The more-or-less lame duck position of vice president is rebranded when Cheney takes the position; he becomes the de facto decision-maker, despite the president’s “I’m the decider” protestations. ISIS probably wouldn’t have existed without Cheney’s intervention, suggests McKay, nor our affinity for waterboarding.

 There are wars closer to home, too: one crucial moment sees the Cheneys selling out their gay daughter Mary (played in the film by Allison Pill), to abet the political aspirations of daughter Liz (Lily Rabe).

 The ambitious woman-behind-the-man is Lynne Cheney (played with steely resolve and a revolving wardrobe of wigs by Amy Adams).

 She’s the one who takes Dick back after his 1963 drunk driving arrest, and she props him up in his early days working for his mentor Donald Rumsfeld (a somewhat miscast Steve Carell), a member of Nixon’s cabinet. It was thanks to Lynne’s charms – and certainly not her husband’s muttering gruffness – that the pair became a D.C. power couple from a time spanning Cheney’s tenure as President Ford’s chief of staff, through George H.W’s Secretary of Defense days, to Halliburton and back again.

 But for all the seriousness of the accusations that the film floats to its viewers, the tone is so intermittently jokey that even card-carrying Democrats will be irritated. (The U.S. electorate has definitively picked sides; we expect, rightly or wrongly, for our political films to do the same.) The narrative skips and jumps and relies too heavily on Bale’s transformation, hoping we won’t notice the pliable truths and sins of omission in the film.

 Most importantly, we leave Vice having been told what a terrible guy Cheney was, but without having been given any theories as to why. And without the why, an attack on any political figure seems too easy, like hunting big game with GPS and a telescopic sight. (Insert Cheney-accidentally-shooting-someone-in-the-face joke here.)

A last-act monologue further obfuscates the message, and now we’re really confused.

A word to Mr. McKay: no one wants to feel sorry for Dick Cheney, especially at Christmas.