THE HORROR....THE HORROR.......THE CHENEY APOCALYPSE IN "VICE"......

Vice (2018)    I suppose after two long, long, long hours, writer-director Adam McKay expects us to choke on our laughter........maybe similar to watching the world go up in a nuclear firecloud at the end of "Dr. Strangelove"....

             Hey, wait a second, he wants us to think, this Machiavellian evil bastard Cheney isn't funny! Over 4000 American soldiers and 600,000 Iraqis killed in the phony war he and Bush engineered?  And we're still fighting over there??Damn, that's a shitload of dead people caused by one guy!

             BQ memo to McKay:   you're too damn late to treat Dick Cheney's life like a slow-motion 'Saturday Night Live' skit.  You can't shame or humiliate him......you can't get under his skin the way the slightest slight gets under Trump's......Cheney's armored and unfeeling as a fire ant.

             And besides, all of the massive damage wreaked by Cheney is a done deal......and he'll stay proud of his vile deeds until his diseased, endlessly repaired heart finally resists his cardiologists' many efforts to keep it beating.

               Turning Cheney's life into a live-action political cartoon might have worked for no more than 80 minutes......minus all the stupifyingly dull dross that McKay uses to give the film epic bloat. (He unwisely cut his best sequence by far......Washington politicking and lobbying explained in a song and dance number.......I can't even describe how many worthless, boring scenes that he left in the film that could have easily been  sliced out to make way for the musical prancing that perfectly encapsulates Washington......

               As for Christian Bale inflating himself like a Macy's Parade Balloon to play Cheney.......unimpressive. Beyond all the makeup and Bale's own Double-Cheese-Whopper body, he finds no real way to illuminate the character.......he's as uninteresting as Ryan Gosling's cardboard-cutout take on Neil Armstrong in "First Man"......

               There are a few moments to praise........Steve Carell as Donald Rumsford hysterically laughing when Bale asks him, "What do we believe?"..........the GOP in a nutshell.......

               And BQ couldn't help liking the film's final kicker......in which McKay finally turns his wrath on the public at large.......who, in their ignorance and indifference, made it possible for monsters like Cheney to ravage the world unimpeded.   Maybe we deserve the Cheneys, the George W's.......and Baby Orange.
           

                That may be the prime audience for this movie........people could only comprehend the toxic depth and effect of Cheney's machinations if it's laid out for them like the origins story of a Marvel Super-Villian.

                But anyone else who figured out for themselves what Cheney was up to hardly needs to punish themselves with this film.  A 10 second glance at a political cartoon does the job just as well.
     1 star (*)