In ‘Vice,’ lots of convenient lies about Christian Bale’s Dick Cheney

NY Post  

Christian Bale as Dick Cheney in “Vice”

"The initial warning is given before “Vice” even starts, in an onscreen note: It’s a “true story,” we’re told. But it’s hard to be strictly factually accurate, the note adds, because Dick Cheney is such a secretive bastard. So it’s really the former vice president’s fault if anything in the movie happens to be wrong.

"Yet at the end a character will break the fourth wall to assert that the whole thing is factual and to add, sarcastically: “Because I have the ability to understand facts, that makes me a liberal?” That sounds like an invitation to consider the facts and logic of “Vice.” I accept.

"Near the start, writer-director Adam McKay implies that Cheney’s father-in-law murdered his mother-in-law by drowning her in a lake*. Huh? What does this have to do with Cheney? Is there more evidence for this than is presented in the movie, which is none?

"After dropping some light murder innuendo, McKay just bustles on. Cheney (Christian Bale) is portrayed as a dirtbag who was kicked out of Yale for boozing and brawling. When he first arrives in Washington, he asks others what he is supposed to believe, because all he knows is that he wants to work for a charismatic White House official, Donald Rumsfeld (played as a sort of Machiavellian yokel by Steve Carell)." . . .

* You mean kinda like Kennedy and Chappaquiddick?