Vice 2018 [2018] Full HD Movie Download
Trim Christian Bale brilliantly morphs into the potato-ish frame of Dick Cheney in a nervy high-wire act of a film that relates, with merciless humor, the odyssey of a thoroughly unpromising young man who slowly but surely thrust greatness (in his own mind) upon himself by shrewdly playing his cards over several decades. One immediate benefit of the film will be to give the Trump-obsessed media someone else to hammer for a while. But fortunately, this film is not Saturday Night Live-style mockery designed merely to score easy political points but, rather, deep dish satire of the sort that is in generally short supply; beyond that, it illuminates how the track was laid to help us arrive at where we are today. This feels like a zeitgeist event that has its finger on the public pulse and its thumb firmly up the rear of its subject.
McKay worked with Bale on 2015's "The Big
Short," which garnered a nod for best picture Bale's
convincing portrayal as hedge fund manager Michael Burry earned the actor
an Oscar nomination. So the director knew what he was getting with Bale for the
role.
Vice is different, perhaps because everyone in it was
a public figure and is portrayed by some famous actor. Christian Bale plays
Cheney, and he — along with Amy Adams as Cheney’s wife Lynne, Steve Carell as
Donald Rumsfeld, and Sam Rockwell as George W. Bush — take up most of the
screen time. But there’s a parade of familiar supporting characters too,
including Colin Powell (Tyler Perry), Scooter Libby (Justin Kirk), and Condoleezza
Rice (LisaGay Hamilton), as well as many senators, Congress members, Cabinet
members, Supreme Court justices, and others. The list goes on and on and on,
with some folks just walking through scenes briefly like ghosts from the past.
It’s an impersonation, though one
brought off on a virtuoso level of observation and exactitude. Bale, thanks to
a stupendous job of prosthetic enhancement, disappears inside Cheney’s doughy
armchair-warrior physique and deceptively innocuous balding head, but a puckish
aura of Bale obsession shines through; he channels everything about Cheney
that, in the Bush era, made him such a recessive and, in his way, magnetic
figure of clandestine destruction. Bale’s Cheney, who has no problem stomping
on the Constitution, behaves like an unhinged ruler, yet he does it with the
officious calm of a civil servant. He’s a dictator giving orders, and a pencil
pusher following orders, all in one body.
It's a challenge that the film seriously embraces over the
course of two hours, but it does so in the humorous spirit of Swift and
Voltaire, or perhaps the likes of Terry Southern and Gore Vidal if you prefer a
more recent era; the surface treatment can seem prankish and outrageous, but
beneath the foolishness lies grave consequence. This is, in other words, a
dead-serious comedy, one that grapples with history and why things went the way
they did, with a hungry conviction.
The trailer shows Steve Carell as Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, showing some nifty office dance moves and then asking Cheney,
"Are you even more ruthless than you used to be?" (He has to think
about that.)
Watching Vice can feel like watching a
highlight reel from the late 20th and early 21st century, except not in a good
way. And certainly, the movie is not an attempt to convert anyone to a new way
of thinking; the audience for this sort of film is likely already sympathetic
to the most obvious of McKay’s theses, which is that Dick Cheney is a heartless
guy. But there are other ideas at play here too.
Yet even
when he’s playing it straight, which is most of the time, McKay treats the
movie as a slightly cracked burlesque. He turns history into a rollicking
circus for liberals, inviting us to revel in Dick Cheney’s Greatest Hits Of
Infamy. “Vice” takes a lip-smacking vengeful glee in shining a light on all the
dark things that Dick Cheney did behind the scenes, from recklessly grabbing
command of the military decision-making process just moments after the first
attack on 9/11 (this included Cheney’s wild order to shoot down any planes
deemed suspicious) to lining up favors for his cronies in the oil industry to
finding arcane “legal” ways to justify the trashing of the Geneva Convention.
None of this will come as news to anyone who regularly consumes the front page
of The New York Times. Nevertheless, the pop catharsis of “Vice,” to the extent
that the movie provides one, is in actually seeing Dick Cheney
throw his weight around, elbowing the wimpy, clueless George W. Bush (Sam
Rockwell) out of the way as he effectively assumes the role of president.
I think I’m just enough older than you that I
had started to question conservative policies in earnest early in the George W.
Bush administration, and the push to invade Iraq, which sent a couple of my
friends overseas for what turned out to be a largely pointless endeavor (they
survived, thank goodness), was what really pushed me away from the Republican
Party I had grown up with. So maybe for that reason, I read Vice pretty differently than
you. The same goes for most of my critic friends (who also hated it), and maybe
even Adam McKay himself.
Leaving its coulda-been happy ending
behind, Vice now
becomes a warped black comedy. Brilliant scene follows brilliant scene: The
Cheneys are glimpsed in bed excitedly exchanging conspiratorial Shakespearean
dialogue (is McKay actually equating the couple to the Macbeth clan?), the vice
president obligingly offers to take a few little matters — like foreign policy,
for starters — off the president's plate just to make things a little easier
for him, while old buddy Rumsfeld is installed as secretary of defense.
Without
belaboring anything, the film makes crystal clear the tragic misguidedness of
the Iraq War, Secretary of State Colin Powell (played straight and very nicely
by an unexpected Tyler Perry) being cornered into supporting it and the
administration's role in influencing historically nonpartisan TV news coverage
(Naomi Watts puts in an uncredited cameo as a reporter), to name just a few
Team Bush initiatives from which there was no turning back.
Part of the reason I couldn’t
sort this out is that I liked how The Big Short was both angry and informative. Like,
if you didn’t know why the housing crisis happened in the first place — and most
people really didn’t, and still don’t — then seeing the movie would actually be
enlightening, in a way that was bound to make you angry. So I was confused as
to why there didn’t seem to be much, if anything, enlightening about Vice. Not that a movie has to teach us something, but
for a long stretch, it seemed like this one wanted to.
Adams is outstanding as her husband's sharp and, in the
early days, far more resourceful accomplice; to twist a popular term of the
time, she certainly was the great woman behind the man, as it's quite clear he
would never have gotten anywhere near where he did without her. Fortunately,
Adams in no way condescends to her character. The couple had two daughters, one
of whom, Mary (played here by Alison Pill), has long been openly gay and
eventually married, with the full support of her father, who, with his libertarian
attitude, split with many other Republicans on the matter. But her sister, Liz
(Lily Rabe), nursing political ambitions of her own, was against it.
Both
Carell and Rockwell start their performances in high-pitch caricature mode but
soon settle into credible grooves that are close enough to the real guys that
you fully accept them; Carell earns some strong laughs, while Rockwell, after
initially overdoing it a bit, ends up channeling George W. in a way that feels
quite satisfying.
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