Vice Dick Cheney Movie: Bad History

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 Cheney’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 say, 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.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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 Cheney’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 say, 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.