Director Adam McKay’s biopic, Vice, opens Christmas Day with the mission of telling the “true” story of Dick Cheney.
But reviewer Kyle Smith of the New York Post paints it as more of a shock and awful campaign to make Cheney look as bad as possible. In fact, Smith compares a scene in which future Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia dishonestly categorizes Article II of the constitution to give the president absolute powers as equivalent to portraying “President Barack Obama joining the Communist Party of Kenya while praying to Allah.”
It gets worse, with Christian Bale’s appearance as Cheney being the most genuine part of the film.
“Vice claims that President George W. Bush started the Iraq War not because he and Cheney thought it was the right thing to do, but because they needed a PR stunt to make Americans like their team,” writes Smith. “This logic is bizarre: The son of the president who enjoyed 90 percent approval ratings after winning his own war with Iraq, then got 38 percent of the vote when he ran for re-election the next year, considered war with Iraq the best way to win re-election?”
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