Critics

David Edelstein on Vice, Mary Poppins Returns, and On the Basis of Sex … Sara Holdren on To Kill a Mockingbird.

- David Edelstein

MOVIES / DAVID EDELSTEIN

Cheney Unchained Vice paints an ugly picture of American history’s most powerful VP.

WITH VICE, THE WRITER-DIRECTOR Adam McKay has devised a rollicking comic style for what amounts to an anti-hagiography, a scabrous portrait of Dick Cheney the Unholy One, cursed be He. The film tracks Cheney (Christian Bale under heavy but seamless makeup) from a young Wyoming screw up scolded after a second drunk driving arrest by his brittle, ambitious wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), to a scarily proficient legislative powermonger, to a global terrorist post-9/11, bombing and torturing willy-nilly. The movie’s fulcrum—which is also its prologue—is that day when TVmonitors teemed with images of burning towers as Vice-President Cheney coolly wrested power from the stumble bum president, George W. Bush—airborne, out of the loop—to the unease of Cabinet officials. “He [wields that power] like a ghost,” read the opening titles, “with most people having no idea who he is or where he came from.” Acknowledging the intense secrecy that continues to surround Cheney, those titles close with the assurance that the filmmakers have done their “fucking best.”