By Alex Deleon

Just back from seeing VICE with a couple of friends. Viewed at Cinestar multiplex, Berlin. This is not a review but just some immediate reactions. In short, over long, drawn out, discombobulated, baloney. Really boring because the people described in it are all boring from the top down and what they have to say sounds like a college term paper being recited. Extremely uninteresting. Full of gimmicks like pretending to end the picture in the middle and running some final credits at that point. Or showing repeated closeups of a beating human heart that looks like a pile of raw liver. to underline the fact that the hero is undergoing a heart transplant. Pseudo documentary style with dates and description of events written on screen every ten minutes. But these inter-titles are more confusing than enlightening because the entire sequencing of the film is so jumbled and messy.The whole film with ragged time toggling back and forth is very confused, even when you are familiar with the events and the order in which they actually occurred. In Sum: I would have walked out halfway through if I hadn't been with friends. The private bedroom and bathroom life of the central couple, Amy Adams and Christian Bale, is more sickening than revealing of their private intimacy. Both are shown in badly lit full screen facial closeups over and over which emphasizes only their dullness. Almost the only memorable scene is when Bale does a full throat gargle with mouthwash in the bathroom while chatting with his wife. Arguably his most lively scene in the entire flick. This is supposed to be about a Vice president, Dick Cheney, who was so powerful that he relegated the president, George W. Bush, to the background in the wake of 9/11 when we are to believe that he took charge and plunged us into a series of dead-end wars. None of this potential power comes across from Bale's limp performance. He emanates weakness, not strength. The characters mulling around in the white house and other government offices got to be so dull that after a while it was a gigantic relief to see Richard Nixon in two brief closeups. His withdrawal from office speech on TV following Watergate actually brought the picture to life for a few seconds, which isn't saying much. One plus. Every scene that Sam Rockwell was in playing president George Bush was more or less watchable. The facial similarity was there and Rockwell played rings around Bale every time he was on. All in all an overweaning pretentious muddled mess that made me heave a sigh of relief when it finally did end after several phoney half baked endings. Much is made of Cheney's life long hobby of angle fishing and at the end we see a rather pretty sequence of colorful angling hooks and flies as if this were the secret key to Cheney's entire personality, like the Rosebud sled at the end of Citizen Kane. But Citizen Cheney is at least a light year away from Kane