Vice

Definitely worth watching and very interesting in its content – a precis of Dick Cheney’s influence on US politics in the last 50 years, and its form – an ambitious mixture of drama and documentary

However

Firstly, its difficult to sustain the aspiration towards documentary when you admit from the off that Cheney was intensely secretive and alot of this is guesswork. So while it leads you down the nose to a very particular interpretation of history, even though i agree with much of the substantive argument, its unclear what can be substantiated and what is speculation, which damages the dramatic authenticity.

Second, i dont buy the implicit argument that everything from Guantanamo Bay through the rise of ISIS to the renaming of global warming as climate change is essentially the result of the machinations of one man and his Lady Macbeth-like wife. As well as letting all sorts of neoliberal Republicrats off the hook, it ends up – despite the dig at Trump followers at the end – implying that the problem has gone away now (call it the Green Book theory of fighting racism)

And did we really need all the laboured fishing metaphors?

Nonetheless it was all done very professionally and i enjoyed myself despite my reservations