A mirthless facsimile of an otherwise rich and twisted skein of source material. The story of the origins of the longest war in American history deserved the Big Short treatment and instead got The Lovely Bones treatment. Vice struggles to find its tone throughout, at times diatribe, absurdist comedy, deadpan satire, but mostly a shallowly constructed PowerPoint of recognizable news moments.
Slate‘s critiques of Vice were concerned with Adam McKay’s to understand the takeaway hindsight has delivered us: the danger of this episode in American politics is not the Machiavelli that McKay paints Cheney, Rumsfeld and the others as, but rather the true believers who, for many years, thought that regime change and democracy could come to the Middle East with minimal loss of life and involvement. This was not an opportunistic one-off. It was part of a multi-decade set of policies advanced by conservative think tanks like Project for the New American Century and its iterations, which were populated by the likes of Kagan, Kristol, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.
I don’t necessarily think that adherence to this view of Cheney’s politics is the only way to tell interesting stories about him–the family drama of his betrayal of a daughter is a rich tragedy in and of itself–but it does feel a little like a bait-and-switch. The absence of positing a moral framework for Cheney’s decisions seems designed to suggest an inherited intellectual tradition for the current president, but isn’t there enough lasting damage from the Bush years without having to tie it into a new Republican presidency?
With this review we’re all caught up from delinquent reviews from the past seven weeks (!).
