Vice Review

Bale's Cheney is the reason this exists and very nearly the reason it works. He built the man from the outside in, the weight and the hunched stillness and a voice that never rises, and then found the part that acting cannot fake: a person whose defining quality is that he does not need to be liked. Watching him listen is more interesting than most films' entire third acts. Amy Adams is his equal in a part written mostly as ambition.

Adam McKay's method is the problem. The fake credits, the fourth wall breaks, the Shakespeare pastiche in the bedroom, the fly fishing metaphor, all of it keeps interrupting a story strong enough to hold attention unaided, and each device announces that the film does not trust you. The structure skips decades on a narrator's say so, so causation gets asserted rather than shown, and the narrator conceit pays off in a twist that is clever and weightless. When it stops performing and simply watches Cheney work, in the room after 9/11, it is genuinely chilling.