Movie Reaction: Vice

Formula: W. ^ The Big Short
 

Let's just get this out of the way. Vice is the new movie from Adam McKay. It's a profile and study of Dick Cheney. It covers Cheney's adult life from 1963 to the present. It's told much in the same way as McKay's very well liked The Big Short. He turns an avalanche of research into a very thorough examination of the man and how the things he did tie into and led to the world as we know it today.

I'm sorry to say, this is going to get angry, but let me start with the good. Christian Bale is excellent. His transformation into Dick Cheney is more than just physical. He gets lost in the role. I was watching the character Dick Cheney on the screen, not Christian Bale. When he's in the Oscar race this winter, I'll have no problem with that (I will note this is also a very weak year for the Lead Actor race). Adam McKay is a master at dumping a lot of information on an audience in an entertaining way. I don't think more information is given in another movie this year, yet it's never dry and rarely feels like and information overload. This movie runs well over 2 hours and I never felt the length. Actors like Amy Adams, Steve Carell, and Sam Rockwell get rich performances out of admittedly underwritten characters. I was actually ready to give this a somewhat negative but ultimately dismissive Reaction and be done with it. I really didn't want to be angry like I was at The Big Short.

Then the mid credits scene happened and now only response is "fuck you!"

Much of what I didn't like about The Big Short applies to Vice as well. This movie also was like watching the film version of a PowerPoint presentation. It works very hard to fit in as much research as humanly possible. Adam McKay is determined to make sure the audience knows that he read a lot of books and really dry documents to put this movie together. I really wish someone would tell him that it's alright to just make a documentary. People love documentaries. They are very popular these days.

Vice is an angry movie. I knew that going in. I was hoping to embrace it. Adam McKay doesn't like Dick Cheney. I really don't either. I like him more than McKay, but I figured a general dislike would put me on the same side as the movie. I don't really agree with the war in Iraq. I think George W. Bush is kind of a fool. I think that the people at the highest levels of government are often slimy individuals who do awful things. You'd think that my love of something like Veep, which is openly contemptuous of government officials, would leave me open to Vice, despite the obvious and admitted bias of the movie.

Then that mid-credits scene happened and confirmed what I was suspicious of but convinced myself I was reading too much into. This movie has contempt for the audience. The last line of the movie might as well have been "OK. I tried to teach you, no go back to your Pokemon. Hopefully your tiny little brains absorbed something from this." Because that's what this movie is. It's people who think they know better trying to dumb things down enough for the lesser folks to understand. That's why he throws in a clip of a lion taking down an antelope rather than let Christian Bale's performance make the same point. It's why he relies so heavily of Jesse Plemons as the narrator to spell things out. Great movies ask something from the audience. This doesn't. There's no discussion with this film. If you agree with it. Great. If not, fuck off.

Even more than The Big Short, I was really bothered by how much this movie covers its ass. It opens by admitting that a lot of the movie is conjecture (Again, a sign that it has no faith in the audience. Other movies assume "Based on a true story" is sufficient). There's a part where it has characters act out a scene in Shakespearean verse to underline the fact that we don't really know how the real conversation played out. McKay is ready for the attacks on the movie and tries to get ahead of it. That mid-credits scene throws out the defense that everything in the movie is full researched and proven, so you can't dismiss it as having a liberal bias. That isn't entirely true though and misses the point of the reasoned criticism of the movie. Yes, I believe that all facts that can be proven are indeed true. However, a point that this very movie makes is that facts can be used to tell different narratives. When there are so many knowledge gaps in a story, the truths can be used in a lot of different way. Granted, this movie assumes the audience is 90% morons anyway, so why bother making a more nuanced argument. Besides, the most damning parts of the movie are shielded by that "we don't know what actually happened, but we fucking tried" warning at the beginning.

I'm glad that a lot of people are seeing through this. Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic both have the movie in the low 60s. That sounds right. The movie is well made on a lot of technical levels. I really didn't hate watching it. The movie does have some problem though and will obviously find a lot of its support and hate drawn along party lines. No one making the movie was naive about that fact. My anger is really directed at Adam McKay and the other creative minds who decided to make this movie in this way. It's smug and does nothing to raise the level of discussion about any of its subject. I have no respect for this film or the filmmaker at this point.