Movie Review: Vice
If you go through the pages and pages of scholarly publications about the powers of the vice president, then you would realize how vast their powers are. I will give you time to look. You will actually discover that there is hardly any research on the vice president because it is a thankless job. It was not until the 1970s that President Carter gave his vice president a plane that the VP even had private transportation. In fact, the president and the vice president rarely even likes each other. All of this was typically true until a man met with his attorney to misinterpret the US Constitution and blind-side a gullible president into signing over the presidency to him.
Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney has done two things that I actually agree with – a loyal husband, and for most part, a loyal father. Other than that, Vice reminds us about the horrible nature of Dick Cheney, while reminding us that President Bush is just a victim. I am not sold that Bush is a victim in all of this, but I am firmly in the camp that Vice President Cheney is trash.
I was unaware of Cheney had an office in the House of Representatives, two offices in the Senate, State Department, the Pentagon, and a secret conference room. He was able to find an attorney that felt firmly the Vice President is not a member of the legislative and the executive branch of government. If this view is correct, then the VP has no oversight. It would also mean that the VP has no accountability.
Who can believe this? This would mean that the VP is one of the most powerful positions in the government! We all knew that Cheney was able to do whatever he wanted except a pardon for Scooter Libby, but we didn’t know that much of this was just simply made up. What we don’t understand is why? Of course, he wanted more power, but what is the central motivation for going into Iraq and making all of these harmful decisions? The answer is something the Vice movie doesn’t truly answer because we don’t have the information to truly answer the question.
Dick Cheney never released any of his financial documentation. We do not know if he gave up his stock in Halliburton. We know that Haliburton made a great deal of money from the Iraq War. There are things that we will never know simply because there is no record of these decisions. Yes, there are no emails. Thousands and thousands of emails are vaporized, as they have purposely been ordered to not ever be archived.
The movie is very much like The Wolf of Wall Street, so the level of sarcasm is much more than any Michael Moore movie. In fact, there are things in this movie that Michael Moore did not even well research. Yet, I did not like the comedy because this movie reminded me why I wanted Hillary Clinton to win rather than Barrack Obama. I wanted someone to go after the crimes Bush and Cheney did instead of peace and love that Obama wanted to do. Unity is for the birds when thousands died for profit.
Overall, the movie is not worth more than $5 Tuesdays, but the performances of Steve Carell, Amy Adams, and Christian Bale are just awesome. The major criticisms are that there is zero mention of Hurricane Katrina. This would not be mentioned if the director didn’t mention the other issues, such as the mortgage meltdown. If you are going to talk about the mortgage meltdown, then show a picture of Katrina and the oil spill in Louisiana. In addition, I am not comfortable with the depiction of George Bush. We all knew that he was not the brightest son, and it was Jeb that was supposed to be president, but to make George so silly that he could not have possibly known what was happening is far-fetched. Both are devious, but Cheney is just more of an extreme person.
Run and see the movie when it comes to Netflix.