Film

Vice

Name: Vice
Genre: Drama, Comedy, History
Released: 2018
Cast: Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Steve Carell, Sam Rockwell, Alison Pill

Adam McKay turns Dick Cheney's rise into a jagged, fourth-wall-breaking black comedy — narration jokes, mock end credits, a fake Shakespearean aside, all in service of a genuinely unsettling question about how quiet, unglamorous men accumulate catastrophic power. Christian Bale disappears into the role. It's for people who liked The Big Short's sugar-coated fury and don't mind their history lessons delivered with a smirk.

TMDb rating

7.0

If you liked this

The Big Short2015

McKay's previous film uses the same toolkit — direct address, stunt casting, gallows humor — to explain the 2008 crash. If you liked Vice's rhythm, this is where it was built.

But The finance jargon can be a slog even with the jokes doing their best to translate it.

Don't Look Up2021

McKay's follow-up aims the same satirical anger at climate denial and media spectacle, with an even starrier cast and a bleaker punchline.

But Subtler than Vice it is not — some found the satire broad to the point of shouting.

The Death of Stalin2017

Armando Iannucci's farce about Soviet power-jockeying after Stalin's death shares Vice's instinct that the corridors of power are mostly staffed by petty, frightened men.

But Broader and more absurdist — less interested in psychological portraiture than in pure comic chaos.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

The Tragedy of Macbeth2021

Vice literally stages a scene as blank verse between the Cheneys; this is the real thing, the same power-couple-corrupted-by-ambition engine played completely straight.

Joel Coen's stark, high-contrast Shakespeare adaptation is the story Vice keeps gesturing at with its own faux-Shakespearean dialogue scene: an ambitious spouse, a hesitant man, a crown taken by increments.

But No jokes, no narration, no winking at the camera — it's austere, formal tragedy, about as far from McKay's register as you can get.

Charlie Wilson's War2007

A charming, cynical account of how one congressman quietly reshaped a war in Afghanistan — same appetite for showing bureaucratic decisions with enormous, invisible consequences.

But Lighter and more conventionally structured; it doesn't push formally the way Vice does.

W.2008no page yet

Oliver Stone's Bush biopic, made while Bush was still in office, gives you the other half of this administration and a very different, more sympathetic Rumsfeld and Cheney circle.

But Straighter and more earnest — it plays as drama, not satire, so the tone shift may feel like a comedown.

The Report2019

Adam Driver methodically uncovers the CIA's torture program born from the same post-9/11 machinery Vice dramatizes — a grim, procedural companion piece.

But Dry and talky by design; there's no McKay-style irony to soften the material.

Frost/Nixon2008

A tighter, two-hander study of presidential power and self-justification, with a career-best Frank Langella performance that rhymes with Bale's controlled menace.

But Stagier and more contained — it's essentially one long interview, which some will find airless.

Bombshell2019

An ensemble political drama with the same appetite for recent-history reenactment and starry prosthetics, this time inside Fox News.

But Tonally uneven — it swings between satire and sincerity less gracefully than Vice manages.

Molly's Game2017

Aaron Sorkin's rapid-fire, narrator-driven true story of ambition and self-mythology has the same restless energy and love of clever structural tricks.

But It's about poker and celebrity, not geopolitics — the stakes feel smaller even if the filmmaking swagger is similar.

The Unknown Known2013

Same subject, opposite medium: where Vice dramatizes and satirizes Rumsfeld, this documentary just watches the real man perform his own unknowability.

Errol Morris's documentary sits Donald Rumsfeld — the actual man Steve Carell plays — in front of a camera and lets his own evasions and memos do the unsettling work.

But Slow, hypnotic, and frustrating by design; Rumsfeld never really answers anything, which is the whole disturbing point.

Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb1964

Vice's whole comic strategy — mocking the men who quietly hold apocalyptic power — is Strangelove's invention; this is the 1964 blueprint for laughing at the unthinkable.

Kubrick's Cold War farce got there first — bureaucrats and generals sleepwalking the world toward catastrophe, treated as absurd comedy rather than tragedy.

But Black and white, decades old, and steeped in nuclear-age anxieties that require a little historical context to fully land.