Vice (2018)

While I thought The Big Short was an okay film, I was not a fan of Adam McKay's direction. To be honest, it didn't work for me at all. Despite that, I still decided to give Vice a shot because of Christian Bale's critically acclaimed performance and Sam Rockwell. 

The film tells the story of Dick Cheney (Christian Bale), an unassuming bureaucratic who silently made his way through the United States' political hierarchy and ended up having more power than anyone in his position as Vice President to George W. Bush. 

Despite the fact that I've never heard of Dick Cheney before —hold your horses, I'm not from the States and I was a just a kid during the Bush administration—, I found Vice to be one of the dullest, most uninteresting and uncompelling films of 2018 as the plot, which follows both the life and the career of Cheney, is convoluted, contrived, messy, the pace is atrociously slow, the non-linear storyline eventually gets frustrating —and adds absolutely nothing to the film— and the narration by Jesse Plemmons, which constantly breaks the fourth wall, tries to be witty but ends up being annoying as it explains everything rather than showing it and essentially treats the audience like idiots. Not to mention how annoying is the "flow" of the story being constantly interrupted by irrelevant videoes.

The characters too are a mess. Supposedly one of the most powerful men in Washington, Dick Cheney comes off as a dull, uninteresting man. Every single other person in this film is made to look like an idiot; they are cartoonish and unrealistic; they lack characterization, complexity, depth. They are just names. Cheney's wife, Lynne, is probably the only exception as she is slightly interesting.

Surprisingly —or maybe not, maybe he's just one of the greatest actors of his generation— Christian Bale gives a terrific performance as Cheney. Not only he went through yet another body transformation for this role, but his voice, his mannerisms, his physicality, he just looked like the real Cheney. Amy Adams isn't given much to do as Cheney's wife but she still manages to give a good performance, the only savable other than Bale's. As for the rest of the cast, Sam Rockwell is wasted to do a George W. Bush impersonation and he's almost unwatchable, and Steve Carell is difficult to be taken seriously.

Annapurna Pictures

There still is an issue about Vice that I need to address. The editing is absolutely terrible, easily one of the worst of the year —why am I not surprised this is up for a Best Editing Oscar?— as it feels like there are pieces of a linear story played at random. The film just doesn't have a direction, it just feels like watching two hours and ten minutes of unrelated, random clips, and it's beyond infuriating.