Vice - Okay

Starring: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell
Director: Adam McKay
Runtime: 2 hours, 12 minutes
Biography | Comedy | Drama | History | 2018

When I heard they were making a biopic about Dick Cheney I thought, alright. When I heard that it was from the same writers as The Big Short, I thought awesome I really liked that movie. When I watched the biopic about Dick Cheney, I didn’t love it as much as I had hoped. The film stars Christian Bale as Dick and Amy Adams as his wife Lynne. The biographical story takes place completely in Cheney’s adulthood where he went from low-life alcoholic to the prolific (bad choice of word?) vice president that sat beside George W. Bush at the White House. There are some things I liked about the film and some things I didn’t.

First, I can definitely see the similarities between Vice and The Big Short when it comes to the film editing. However, in Vice, they took it way too far. The film was so oddly put together that it steered away from the story itself. I would imagine they were going in this direction to add the comedy aspects to the movie, but for me it was just way too much and quite honestly childish.

Second, the acting in this movie was wonderful. Though it took me the entire more to get over Amy Adams with that kind of hair (ok I still haven’t gotten over it), I thought the leading couple really made a name for themselves on screen. Alison Pill and Lily Rabe played Dick’s grown daughters in the film and I thought they were good supporting actresses.

Third, I’m seriously wondering how much validity this movie has. On one hand I love watching these historical movies because it’s so interesting and I have no clue what happened in history (in detail that is). So I almost hope that majority of this movie was real, but a lot of it was so far fetched that I couldn’t really believe it entirely. And I don’t understand why they portrayed George W. Bush as an idiot, was that actually his personality? I actually had just finished reading the Bush sisters memoirs and it’s hard to read that, a loving image, and go straight into an image of someone not capable of anything.

I’m going to give this film an “okay” rating. I wouldn’t be surprised if Bale or Adams gets an Oscar nomination, but I wouldn’t say this film was anything amazing. (3/5).

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