MovieManifesto

Adam McKay fancies himself an educator. He may clothe his films in the garb of genre, but only as a way to stealthily impart some wisdom onto unsuspecting audiences. And so, The Other Guys was a dumb buddy-cop comedy that attempted to smuggle in some rhetoric about financial malfeasance; The Big Short more directly addressed the collapse of America’s housing market, but it did so in the guise of a playful procedural, chronicling how a few smart guys got rich while the banks went bankrupt. Now comes Vice, a cheerful comedy that also happens to be a biopic of one of the nation’s most loathsome politicians, Dick Cheney.

You may quarrel with McKay’s politics, but you cannot deny that as a director, he has developed his own signature style. That is not a compliment. Vice, which hectically barrels through four decades of Cheney’s life before slowing its pace slightly during his fateful years in the Bush administration, often seems like a two-hour music video—the ugliest, messiest, least sexy such video ever made. Each shaky shot is held for approximately two seconds, while every scene is constantly interrupted by a barrage of random inserts, whether quick-hitting flashbacks or footage of wildlife metaphorically moving in for the kill. It’s like if a history textbook were animated by Paul Greengrass. Read More