Starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Tyler Perry, Alison Pill, Lily Rabe, Jesse Plemons, LisaGay Hamilton, Eddie Marsan, Justin Kirk, Shea Whigham, and Bill Camp.Written & Directed by Adam McKay.
★★½
There's a certain flavor of political movie Hollywood likes to churn out. There's the HBO model, that likes to retell recent history under the prism of "Democrats are the good guys; Republicans are the bad guys." This one escalates it to "Democrats are righteous but naive; Republicans are pure evil."
The angry fervor Adam McKay brought to The Big Short worked well. He wanted to inform and enrage but also entertain. I would argue it worked on a bipartisan level. But that movie was based on a book and he had a co-writer. Here he's doing writing duties by himself with no book blueprint, and he can't help himself. It's an angry, sloppy diatribe that blames everything that's wrong with this world on Dick Cheney (Christian Bale), whom he will have you know is the most evil human being on the planet today. At one point, he puts the creation of ISIS fully on Cheney's shoulders.
Bale thanked Satan for inspiration in how to play Cheney, and he wasn't kidding.
It jumps around on the timeline, but we see how influential Lynne (Amy Adams) is in getting Dick to have some ambition and be a better husband and father than her own father was. We at least see that Dick loves his daughters, but that would be a human thing, so naturally they have to sabotage that by the end.
All the characters in this movie are evil or stupid or Democrats. It's like watching House of Cards where Frank Underwood doesn't say anything to the camera or other people, but we get this narrator (Jesse Plemons) who assures us that Dick is evil and here's what he was probably plotting. (The ultimate reveal as to who the narrator is another cheapening trick.)
Even the most minor of characters like pollster Frank Luntz are blasted as evil. When Luntz figures out that "death tax" works better in focus groups than "estate tax" he practically twirls his mustache and cackles "Mwa ha ha!"
Granted, Cheney did enormous damage to this country and the world with some of his misguided policies and cherry-picking of intelligence. And I was certainly never bored by what was going on. Bale and Adams deserve the nomination buzz they've been getting. Bale transforms himself, and Adams just feels like she's due. Carell's Donald Rumsfeld is an amoral clown, and Sam Rockwell's George W. Bush might as well drool and wear a propeller hat. Tyler Perry captures the indignity of Colin Powell recognizing he's in the minority of an increasingly wrong-headed Cabinet.
Even in the middle of the closing credits we get one final self-congratulatory scene from McKay that undercuts whatever points he thought he was making.
Deep down, what is Cheney's motivation? His personal ethic? His driving force? McKay doesn't know and doesn't care. Cheney's just evil. If these are why events transpired the way they did, yes, it's horrifying. But this makes Michael Moore look like Dinesh D'Souza.
