I lean so far left that I struggle to stand upright and maintain an open mind. But a bad movie is a bad movie, I don't care which side of history it is on.
VICE is an uneven and dishonest mess, a real disappointment from director Adam McKay, who did such a fine job with THE BIG SHORT.
Other reviewers-- amateur and professional-- have raked VICE's many flaws over the coals. I'll reduce my complaint to one glaring omission which brings into focus how tendentious this movie is:
We are shown the NYTimes editorial by Joseph Wilson that angered the White House into retaliating: someone (the movie blames Cheney, which is plausible) leaks the fact that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA agent, blowing her cover.
The Times may have been innocent in "Plamegate," but it, and nearly all of mainstream media, has blood on its hands for having supported the Administration's blatantly false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Cheney alone isn't responsible for the invasion of Iraq, far from it, yet that is what McKay very clearly implies, leaving the media off the hook. There was more than one bad guy who engineered invasions that resulted in more than 4,000 dead soldiers and 30,000 wounded ones-- and that's just the American casualties.
On the upside, Christian Bale's performance is as close to a perfect imitation as I can imagine, and Sam Rockwell brings expert comic subtlety to his portrayal of Bush II.
VICE is an uneven and dishonest mess, a real disappointment from director Adam McKay, who did such a fine job with THE BIG SHORT.
Other reviewers-- amateur and professional-- have raked VICE's many flaws over the coals. I'll reduce my complaint to one glaring omission which brings into focus how tendentious this movie is:
We are shown the NYTimes editorial by Joseph Wilson that angered the White House into retaliating: someone (the movie blames Cheney, which is plausible) leaks the fact that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, is a CIA agent, blowing her cover.
The Times may have been innocent in "Plamegate," but it, and nearly all of mainstream media, has blood on its hands for having supported the Administration's blatantly false claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Cheney alone isn't responsible for the invasion of Iraq, far from it, yet that is what McKay very clearly implies, leaving the media off the hook. There was more than one bad guy who engineered invasions that resulted in more than 4,000 dead soldiers and 30,000 wounded ones-- and that's just the American casualties.
On the upside, Christian Bale's performance is as close to a perfect imitation as I can imagine, and Sam Rockwell brings expert comic subtlety to his portrayal of Bush II.