Christian Bale makes full use of his skills as an actor and of the prosthetics department to offer us an engaging, if largely speculative, account of the rise of Dick Cheney. A man of modest abilities at school, he managed to master and then to manipulate the American political establishment to the point where, elected vice-president, auteur Adam McKay would have us believe he was the de-facto ruler of the United States. It's interesting how this domino trail becomes established. The old school network putting, initially, the politically savvy Donald Rumsfeldt (Steve Carell) into a position able to advance the career of the increasingly ambitious Cheney. His wife "Lynne" (Amy Adams) is no slouch here, either - she shares her husband's quest for power and when George Bush Sr wins election, Cheney's unique abilities to exploit the government machine and ensure his own self-promotion and preservation come to the fore. The arrival of the ostensibly rather hapless and out-of-his-depth George Bush Jr in the White House appears to play into his hands still further as the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent invasion of Iraq are presented, here at any rate, as decisions made by a government within a government using the principle of unfettered "executive authority". It hasn't quite the satirical nature of an Aaron Sorkin script, but it's still quite a darkly focussed, at times quite depressingly pitched assessment of the the paper-thin nature of American democracy, of money buying power and of incompetence being no barrier to the nuclear codes. At times that's quite funny, at other times quite scary - but through it all, Bale and Adams work well. Together they form a power couple that might just have put the Clinton's to shame. How much is true, could be true, might be true? Doesn't really matter - US politics is a brutal game and just like as with many European monarchies, it's just as dynastic!

Well, it's not at all hard to make Dick Cheney look like an evil man. Unfortunately this film goes a bit beyond that and comes across as completely and totally bias About ten minutes into the film, it doesn't seem like you are watching something as fair and critical as Stone's W, or even as critical as Liman's Fair Game. Instead what you get is a film that, well, that feels like a hit piece from start to finish and it comes as a shock when the film ends and the director didn't take the opportunity to blame him for the Reichstag fire. And, mind you, this is Dick Cheney we are talking about, a man that you can make out to be a monster without turning a film about him into a hit piece. So, when you get the sense that it's taking things a bit far...it's REALLY taking things a bit far. The plus side is that Bale does deliver and do a really great Cheney, despite the fact he's in a Leni Riefenstahl film. Sam Rockwell, however, plays an absolutely horrible W, to the point where it makes you wish they had cast Will Ferrell. But, in the end, you have a hit piece that makes little attempt to disguise itself as a hit piece, while covering a man that could easily look like an absolute monster without the over-exaggerations.

Vice (2018) Direction: 8/10 Filmmaking: 7.5/10 Story: 8/10 Acting: 9.5/10 Entertainment: 8/10 Musical Score: 9/10 Final Grade: 8.3/10 Standout Performance: Christian Bale Summary: Vice rises up against many of its competitors in the American Political genre of film as Director Adam McKay delivers a very informative, dramatic, and what I can assume to be as accurate as possible tale of Vice President Dick Cheney, and the George W. Bush administration.