Vice (2018)

Brainy, audacious, and fun, the savage satire is a tonic for troubled times that delights in throwing everything on screen and playing games with structure while delivering a dark warning about ignoring facts. It succeeds through committed acting, especially Bale’s transformative portrayal of Cheney and Adams as his driving force.

McKay delivers a scorchingly audacious dark tragicomedy about Cheney's rise that illuminates history with buoyant humor and depth. Bale's transformative performance as the shape-shifting Cheney is singled out for particular praise.

It is smart filmmaking from a director who improves with every film and features a near career-best from Bale. The film mixes formal games and strong performances to deliver an angry lesson in American civics.

McKay's savage satire chronicles Cheney's career as a sinister true-life drama of Shakespearean proportions, with standout performances especially Bale's uncannily convincing portrayal. The gimmicks and showboating make it divisive, but the calibre of the acting is inarguable.

The critic finds the film entertaining and nihilistic, with a standout central performance from Christian Bale as the blandly magnificent Dick Cheney. McKay's meta gags and structural tricks are effective, making it stronger than his previous effort The Big Short.

McKay delivers a daringly impressionistic biopic anchored by Bale's astounding, vicious performance as Cheney, with radical editing and audiovisual flair that feels timely. Some metaphors and bookends strain, but the jazzy momentum and pop-cultural details carry it.

Vice is political satire at its keenest, less a conventional biopic than a howl of frustration. Christian Bale delivers a massive, transformative performance that outstrips his previous work.

The film is bravura storytelling that offers a fast, witty tour through recent US politics. Bale's performance makes Cheney both buffoonish and sinister.

The film presents a negative great man theory of history, showing how Dick Cheney bent reality to his will through discipline, guile, and luck. It mixes psychohistory, domestic drama, and sketch-comedy satire, grounded in Christian Bale’s canny performance, and serves as a cure for amnesia about recent events.

The film is an effervescent pop biography that eviscerates its subject while showcasing Bale's physical transformation and McKay's formal inventiveness through freeze frames, cutaways, and a surprise narrator twist.

Bale's spot-on Cheney impersonation anchors the rollicking comic anti-hagiography despite gimmicks. The film's structural problems and reliance on journalistic sketches rather than dramatic heft are noted as drawbacks.

McKay's satirical portrait of Dick Cheney turns the character into a Bond-villain parody, blaming him for far too much while oversimplifying complex politics into a smug conspiracy. Bale's performance is praised as infinitely watchable and terrifyingly unknowable.

Bale's impression of Cheney is the film's sole virtue amid glib and superficial material. The spaghetti-at-the-wall approach and fourth-wall breaks are singled out as mostly second-rate and under-dramatized.

The film mixes effective anger and strong performances with an uneven, sometimes overly comedic tone that undercuts its seriousness. Bale's physical and vocal transformation into Cheney stands out as the dramatic core.

McKay's noisy, self-conscious biopic preaches to the choir with isolated bits of lunacy but lacks momentum and curiosity about its subject. Bale's performance offers some grace notes, but the director's revulsion overrides empathy.

There is anger but no insight in this glib, unfocused satire that preaches to the choir and becomes less persuasive as it goes; McKay squanders Bale's convincing performance on a self-satisfied portrait that fails to deliver a compelling Cheney.

The portrait is too crude to shed meaningful light on its subject despite strong performances. McKay's narrative gimmicks and lack of psychological depth undermine the biopic.

Bale gives a perfect impersonation of Cheney, but the satire feels overly ambitious and messy in its execution. The film is praised for ambition yet critiqued for trying too hard with its stylistic flourishes.

The film delivers an entertaining but damning portrait of unfettered power operating in secret. It prioritizes showing the broader political landscape and Cheney’s role in it over deep character insight, with strong performances grounding the absurd elements.

The critic finds it a funny, infuriating, scathing portrait of Cheney as the architect of modern political woes, praising Bale's transformative performance while noting the unsubtle approach.

The critic praises McKay as one of the best cinematic satirists for this unconventional biopic of Dick Cheney. Bale delivers a pitch-perfect, wickedly funny impersonation, with strong support from Adams and others; the film is smart, sharp, relevant and funny.

The critic praises the blisteringly angry and funny condemnation of Cheney, highlighting the satirical style, strong performances especially Bale and Adams, and the film's bold approach to exposing power abuses.

Bale delivers an astonishing performance as the calculating Cheney, supported by strong turns from Adams and Rockwell, but the film’s satirical approach feels mismatched to its grim subject matter and results in an uneven, standard biopic structure.

The film attempts an ambitious satirical condemnation of Cheney and Republican power plays over decades but feels overly strained and self-conscious. It lacks the humor and lightness of McKay’s earlier work, resulting in a flawed effort despite some strong performances and a solid thesis.

The critic finds the film mediocre overall, arguing McKay's wacky comedic approach is the wrong tack for the subject and fails to be insightful or confrontational. It highlights how white mediocrity rises in politics but pokes fun without accountability.