Film Review - Vice (2019)

Vice is written and directed by Adam McKay who also made the Big Short and stars Christian Bale as Dick Cheney the one time Vice President of the United States during the Bush administration and the film shows how he met his wife Lynne (Amy Adams) and how he eventually rose to the second most powerful position in the White House.

Vice has some good performances but it was a film that I hated watching for these reasons:

- Firstly the editing here is simply atrocious, you are bombarded with one quick cut after another, one tangent after another and one misdirect after another that you just sit there in your damn seat going “What the Hell am I fucking watching” as so much stuff is thrown at you at times out of order with the timeline of events as they took place (and I thought Bohemian Rhapsody fiddled around with events.) that I just got annoyed with it all and just wanted Mr McKay and his editors to just tell a coherent story.

- Secondly those tangents come right out of nowhere and misdirect you in such a way that it takes you out of the experience of watching the film and the story unfold and for one or two times it was an interesting gimmick but this movie does it over and over and over again as if your so bloody stupid Mr Cinema Goer that every point has to be explained over and over again and I just think to myself “Yeah mate I got this the first time I’m not an idiot” and the more the film went on I just wanted it to end.

And in admist this mess of incompetence is some great performances chief among them Mr Bale as Dick Cheney he inhabits this character so well that you don’t think your watching Bale as an actor, Ms Adams is also very good as Lynne Cheney and I also really liked Steve Carrell as Donald Rumsfield the former Defence Secretary and I wish he was being nominated instead of Sam Rockwell as George W Bush who comes across both in his performance and the portrayal in the film as way too cartoonish and the real W was not like that even though he could be a bit fumbly at times.

And so that was my review of Vice and I hated this movie for his scattershot filmmaking and inept editing and at times cartoonish performances that don’t do any justice to the real people, 1 out of 5.