Writer-director Adam McKay’s passel of broad comedies and more recent sociopolitical satires have three interesting attributes in common. The first is a focus on wayward American men, fictional and actual, and a hankering to dissect them and flesh out their trajectories. The second is iconoclasm, evident in the zeal with which McKay’s films explode popular institutions and ideologies, ranging from NASCAR to the nuclear family to trickle-down economics. The third is provocation, by which the viewer is poked enough to feel considered, challenged, and perhaps even culpable for the on-screen action.
Vice prioritizes the telling of this origin story, as well as the juicy years immediately preceding and following 9/11, while skimming the periods in between: most notably, Cheney’s tenure as secretary of defense under President George H.W. Bush and his activities as CEO of the oil-field services company Halliburton. But McKay gets his point. Cheney develops a taste for power and influence. He becomes an expert at wielding power because, as the film suggests, he’s an expert at reading people and giving them exactly what they think they want. For example, Cheney reads George W. Bush (Sam Rockwell) as a wayward son who longs to impress his father, and thus he manipulates W. into invading Iraq to finish a job H.W. started. These are broad strokes, to be sure, but McKay’s protean, faux-documentary style allows for such heady shortcuts to gnaw at an essential truth: that power run amok is a dangerous beast.
Directed by Adam McKay. R. 132 min. In wide release.
