Bale, thanks to a stupendous job of prosthetic enhancement, disappears inside Cheney’s doughy armchair-warrior physique and deceptively innocuous balding head, but a puckish aura of Bale obsession shines through he channels everything about Cheney that, in the Bush era, made him such a recessive and, in his way, magnetic figure of clandestine destruction. It’s an impersonation, though one brought off on a virtuoso level of observation and exactitude. Bush’s bumbling reign, held to be the de facto control freak behind the throne), Christian Bale nails the Dick Cheney persona - dry, pointed, deceptively dull, invisibly passive-aggressive, a blank with a hint of a growl - and does it with a playful bravura that could hardly be more perfect. In “ Vice,” Adam McKay’s brashly entertaining but not, in the end, as rich or deep as you want it to be biopic of the 43rd president’s vice-president (a man who conventional wisdom, during George W. That’s why the truth is whatever I say it is. When he confronted an interviewer with that wry avuncular voice and slightly beady glare and spit a phrase like “enhanced interrogation techniques” out the side of his mouth, Cheney, in his everything-is-process staccato way, seemed to be telling it like it was. No matter how extreme his views (more torture! more fossil fuels! more dismissal of the mainstream media! more war!), he always made it sound reasonable, as if he were discussing not attack-dog politics but facts. Speaking in soft terse corporate tones, with the precision squint of someone running a marketing seminar, Cheney was the ultimate stealth power player - the mild-mannered functionary of burn-it-all-down conservatism. From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump, the leaders of right-wing Republican politics have tended to be fire-breathers (or, in the case of Reagan, a saber rattler who could make snake oil taste like honey).
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