What led the nominations at the Golden Globes, and now pulling in eight Academy Award nominations this past week, Adam McKay’s “Vice” is a film to be recognized.
But should it be?
Producer, writer and director Adam McKay, who is known for films such as “The Big Short,” “Ant-Man” and “Step Brothers,” brought former Vice President of the United States Dick Cheney to screen in his end of the year hit, “Vice.”
The film follows Cheney as a young drunk man living in Wyoming to his first job at the White House and eventually leads up to his rise to power as the vice president.
The film is separated into two parts: the first being an introduction to Cheney’s life where we really learn who he is as a man, and the second beginning in July 2000 when Cheney chose to run with George W. Bush as his VP candidate.
The second part of the film, which was more than half, all contained events that happened in the last 20 years, which is a bit redundant because we all just lived through them.
How could we forget when Cheney leaked false information to “The New York Times” claiming that Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction,” and caused a war which never needed to even happen?
The events did not just happen yesterday, but they happened so recently that a young man such as myself sat through a 2-hour and 12-minute film waiting to watch and learn something that they didn’t already know.
If you are in need of a walk down memory lane, then this film is for you, because it is nothing more than a retelling of the first eight years of the 21st-century.
A film, which claims to be a bio-pic about our country’s former vice president, came across as nothing more than a joke. The idea of the film was to show how one man can twist and manipulate an entire government to do everything he wants (a call to today’s world), but it did nothing more than reprise events occurring in the last 15-20 years and make each person involved look like complete buffoons.
George W. Bush, who was portrayed by Academy Award-winner Sam Rockwell, was made to look like he never received an education past the fifth grade. A scene that took place at his ranch in Texas in the summer of 2000, when Bush asked Cheney to be his running mate in the 2000 United States Presidential Election, was made to look as if Bush completely handed over the reins to Cheney and didn’t even care if he personally had a say in how the country was run.
Sitting in his backyard, eating BBQ chicken, Bush told Cheney he could do whatever he wanted to do as the VP. The film completely stopped as soon as Bush finished the statement. With a piece of chicken falling from his mouth, the camera zoomed in on the shot, making Bush look like an idiot and one of Cheney’s pawns.
This column does not reflect my political views in any way, but it does reflect my view as an avid filmgoer. McKay cannot claim to make a bio-pic about someone so well-known in our country’s history and then distort it to make it seem as if everyone around Cheney was a moron or did his bidding.
The sole highlight of the film came from Christian Bale, who portrayed Cheney himself: the one redeeming quality of the film, because without Bale’s flawless performance, this would have been nothing more than a biased production.
Bale recently won the Golden Globe for his performance as Cheney and has most recently been nominated for it by the academy, his fourth Academy Award nomination eight years.
Bale portrays Cheney from a young man in Wyoming to his heart transplant surgery, which he received in 2012. From the young drunk who was arrested for driving under the influence to the old man thinking he was going to die, you would have never known it was Bale. He captures every part of Cheney impeccably right down to his hand mannerisms. In my opinion, Bale will receive his second Oscar on Feb. 24.
It goes without saying that the film’s costume and makeup staff were also amazing. Each actor looked just like his/her real-life counterpart right down to the wrinkles on Lynne Cheney’s hands.
“Vice” was a film that took recent events from our country’s history and tried to make audiences reflect and compare them to what is going on in our country now. Adam McKay goes about this the wrong way and, in my opinion, becomes a part of the problem.
Ken Downey Jr. is the Features Editor for Time OFF and Packet Publications. This is the first in a series of weekly columns focusing on arts and entertainment. He can be contacted at [email protected].