Broadly delivered satire buries 'Digger'

 

   Director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s Digger dances on the knife’s edge between farce, satire, physical comedy, environmental pleading, and silliness, all sketched in broad comic strokes that border on self-parody.

    An unrecognizable Tom Cruise portrays a bloviating oil baron who dwarfs the other characters, turning them into padding that fills an over-stuffed movie that proves heavy-handed as it evokes memories of better out-sized satires. Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Dr. Strangelove comes to mind.

    Cruise's Digger Rockwell finds himself mired in an environmental crisis. One of his Greenland rigs has unleashed a massive chunk of ice that will flood Europe, leaving multitudes dead in its wake.

     Deeply hidden by a major application of prosthetics, Cruise puts on a show, igniting an  outburst of ego, crudeness, and boisterous behavior; Digger becomes a grotesque absurdity, a bully devoted to the aging, incontinent cat that shares  his bed.

     As you might guess, Digger allows Cruise to pull out all the stops, creating a larger-than-life figure who has more regard for profit than for the planet. An unashamed boor, he eventually delivers a super-charged monologue in which he declares himself to be the monster everyone really wants. 

    Rant about global warming if you will, but no one wants a world without heat and transportation, and other comforts reliant on our increasingly ravenous demands for oil.

     The supporting cast includes Riz Ahmed as Ganesh, an environmentalist who breaks the horrific news to Digger. John Goodman signs on as President Compson, a politician suffering from bloated rhetoric and a terminal case of rectal cancer. Michael Stuhlbarg plays the vice president, and Sandra Huller appears as Emma Rockwell, Digger’s half-sister and the head of an environmentally conscious company that Digger finances as a salve to Emma's conscience.

     Sporting a ridiculous Dutch Boy wig, Jesse Plemons plays a character whose function becomes clear as the movie progresses. I mention the hair not only because Plemons looks ridiculous but because, like much of the movie's choices, it seems like an excuse to add another sight gag.

       I won’t describe the trick the movie plays on the audience, except to say that it has a meta quality and revisits the theatricality Inarritu explored in Birdman, a movie about an actor seeking a second wind.

       Crowded with detail, transparent artifice, and more than a few puzzling moments, Digger —written by Inarritu along with Sabina Berman, Alexander Dinelaris, and Nicolas Giacobone — is a no-holds-barred satire that can be seen as a major act of cinematic daring from Inarritu. 

       But Inarritu's proverbial Big Swing results in small payoffs, moments of visual cleverness augmented by Cruise’s centerpiece performance. And for all the movie’s ambition, its most resonant moment arrives during its eerie end credits, not exactly the place where a movie ought to hit its best notes.

    Inarritu injects a few moments of mordant humor — jokes about an answered prayer,  for example — but a  strong cast can’t save the movie from its teeming excesses. Digger suggests that if we remove the protective scrim of illusion, we’ll see the dark truth about who we are and where we’re headed. 

       Fair enough, but Inarritu can’t seem to push beyond cartoonish caricature that fails to pierce the conscience. Too often, it just lands with a thud.

A dive into a conspirator's world

  Bugonia, director Yorgos Lanthimos’s take on the 2003 Korean genre mashup Save the Green Planet!, focuses on two conspiracy-minded men who kidnap the head of a large and powerful pharmaceutical corporation. They believe she’s an alien intent on destroying Earth.

  With Jesse Plemons and Emma Stone headlining, Bugonia continues what's beginning to look like a Lanthimos repertory company. Plemons worked with Lanthimos on the recent Kinds of Kindness, and Stone appeared in Lanthimos's The Favourite, Poor Things, and Kinds of Kindness.

  Despite its outlandish premise, Bugonia might be the least obscure film in Lanthimos’s catalogue, a bizarre tale with cautionary overtones, humor, and sudden bursts of horror-level violence.

  Plemons plays Teddy, a disheveled man who lives in an isolated rural home with his cousin Donny  (Aidan Delbis). The brains of this duo, Teddy bosses Donny around, encouraging him to chemically castrate himself so that he’s not distracted from his mission by nagging desires. Teddy argues that sex  makes men more malleable, which is why he already neutered himself. Dependent on Teddy, Donny goes along.

    Stone portrays Michelle Fuller, the object of Teddy's obsessions. With help from Donny, he kidnaps Michelle at her upscale home.  Teddy wants Michelle to transport him to her mothership so that he can negotiate the withdrawal of invaders from the Andromeda galaxy, hostiles who are responsible for all that's wrong with life on Earth. 

  I said the movie might be Lanthimos’s least obscure; I didn’t say that it wasn’t bizarre. This time, though, much of the strangeness is explained by Will Tracy’s screenplay, which finds its best moments as it follows the intricate logical gymnastics that led Teddy to his conspiratorial epiphanies.

   Teddy approaches his preoccupations with a student's zeal. He purports to be an expert on Andromedan physiology, for example. In addition to shaving Michelle's head, supposedly to cut off communication with her alien superiors, Teddy and Donny try to impede her alien powers by coating her body with antihistamine cream.

   Teddy's intelligent enough to give his rants a credible backdrop: He says he's arrived at is conclusions only after exhausting all other explanations for what's wrong with the world.

  Smart and wily, Michelle tests a number of strategies to deal with the only two members of Earth’s resistance, self-appointed ambassadors in ill-fitting suits who try to behave as if they're interrogating a foreign dignitary.

  Eventually, we learn that Teddy has another motivation, one involving his mother (Alicia Silvestone). Mom was left in coma after participating in an anti-opioid drug trial run by Michelle's company. 

  Most of the movie belongs to Plemons, who brings deranged seriousness to his role as an alien-hunting nutcase. That's not to say that Lanthimos doesn't toy with our perceptions. Crazy as Teddy may be, what if he's onto something? And isn’t Michelle a bit too severe, a bit too transparent in her calculating efforts?

   The story ties itself to themes about endangered life on Earth, signaled here by references to a declining bee population. A beekeeper, Teddy looks to hives for inspiration. Bees work selflessly for the good of the group. That’s his rationale, as well.

   Plemons and Stone make convincing adversaries, and Delbis adds pathos as a paunchy assistant who occasionally wrestles with his conscience. He's the guy who can't quite figure anything out. 

   Teddy’s meeting with the local sheriff (Stavros Halkias) creates another moment of weird deadpan comedy, this one capped off with bloodshed.

  Cinematographer Robbie Ryan gives the movie's images plenty of edge, and the jolts in Jerskin Fendrix's score can arrive like slaps in the face.

  Scenes of torture may prove too much for some viewers, and I thought the movie’s ending took some steam off Lanthimos's fastball. That may have been intended. The ending is meant to resonate in haunting ways, but I'm not sure the somber tonal shift was fully earned.

   Bugonia won’t replace The Favourite or Poor Things on my list of superior Lanthimos movies; it’s better at being amusing than at being terrifying, and it's fairly limited in terms of the story it tells. At times, it resembles a demented sketch.

    Still, the bold and unapologetic Bugonia commands attention, taking us deep inside a world in which insanity seems the norm.

   And, yes, I had to look it up, too. Bugonia is an ancient Greek word referring to the sacrifice of a cow so that bees would emerge from its carcass. Spend as much time as you wish connecting this to Lanthimos's film.

A triptych from Yorgos Lanthimos

     I had an oddly mixed response to Yorgos Lanthimos's Kinds of Kindness, the director's follow-up to the well-received Poor Things, which won a best-actress Oscar for Emma Stone.  

 Was I confounded? At times. Did I find the movie revelatory? Not really. Did I wonder whether Lanthimos has become a prisoner of his own stylized weirdness? That, too.

    Yet Lanthimos held my attention, even as I made peace with the fact that this over-extended movie (two hours and 45 minutes) wasn’t accomplishing much more than providing a showcase for the strange flights of imagination that characterize Lanthimos's work.

     Among them: severed fingers, intentional car crashes, nudity sans eroticism, a pool full of water derived from tears, and a frantic sexual foursome. 

     Lanthimos divides his movie into three distinct stories in which the same actors play different roles. A recurring character named RMF crops up in each of the segments.  

      Reunited with regulars Stone and Willem Dafoe, Lanthimos maintains tension with a signature blend of discordant sound design, unsettling music, and images that tease the surreal, the bizarre presented as if it were normal.

   The cast, which also includes Jesse Plemons in a featured role, fully embraces Lanthimos’s approach. Safe to say that actors who appear in Lanthimos films have a taste for stretching the borders of realism.

  So what the hell is the movie about? In the first segment, a controlling boss (Dafoe) tries to coerce a servile employee (Plemons) into crashing a car into another car, an act of obedience that could result in the death of the other driver. 

   In the second film, Plemons plays a police officer whose marine researcher wife (Stone) is rescued after being stranded at sea. She returns but seems to be a facsimile of her “real” self, a synthetic doppleganger who is asked by her suspicious husband to cut off different body parts to prove how far she'll go to prove her love.

   Film three finds Stone playing a woman who leaves her husband and daughter to join a cult run by a leader (Dafoe) who expels her after deeming her impure. 

   None of these brief descriptions do justice to the three segments, which are full of intricacies and digressions and which make room for performances by Margaret Qualley, Hong Chau, Joe Alwyn, Mamaoudou Athie, and Yorgos Stefanakos. 

    I’m not a Lanthimos devotee, although I greatly admire The Favourite and Poor Things. Still, I’d say that Kinds of Kindness qualifies as a lesser work that suggests themes — abuse of power, submission to power, and insanity made commonplace — without exploring them deeply. The movie can be perplexing, funny in a deadpan way, and even off-putting. 

   Less lavish than Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness feels  like a sketchbook in which the director tests various ideas.  If you see the movie, you’ll notice that Lanthimos's close-ups have a cruel intensity, unless, of course, you’ve always wanted to examine every pore and blemish on Plemon’s face, to cite just one example.

   I felt no ill will toward Kinds of Kindness. Scorn might have been better than a giggle and a shrug accompanied by little desire to unpack the movie's mysteries any further. I'll offer this, though:

   At one point, Lanthimos makes use of the Eurythmics hit, Sweet Dreams. The song's lyrics, also featured in the movie’s trailer, provides a strong suggestion about what drives the movie’s characters:

   “Some of them want to use you 

   Some of them want to be used by you

   Some of them want to abuse

   Some of them want to be abused”

   As I said, not Lanthimos’s best work, but the director kept me watching with the mixture of attention and curiosity his work always demands.

“Power of the Dog’: Lots of bark and bite, too

   

   Jane Campion hasn’t released a film in 12 years. The director's  fans have been waiting and Power of the Dog doesn’t disappoint. Set in the American west in 1929, the film seems like a Western but might more accurately be described as a vivid exploration of power and masculinity.

  Campion, who also wrote the screenplay, bases her movie on a 1967 novel by the late Thomas Savage. Savage's set-up is classical, nearly Biblical. 

  Two brothers (Benedict Cumberbatch and Jesse Plemons) operate a thriving ranch. The brothers couldn’t be less alike. Cumberbatch’s Phil is a macho cowboy who was schooled in the ways of the West by his idol — the late Bronco Henry. 

   Never seen in the film, Bronco’s spirit continues to be felt. Think of  the myth around Bronco as Phil’s religion. Bronco saw things that other people didn’t, Phil tells us.  

   A man of the earth, Phil rides, ropes, castrates bulls, and runs the ranch. He’s less a character than a force. He's also intelligent, talented homophobic, and ... well ... you can guess the rest.

  Plemons’s George is another kind of man. He’s cultured (to a point) and kind and you don’t have to know much to draw archetypical comparisons between the brothers.

  Jonny Greenwood’s score enhances tension and adds an unsettling aura to the film, helping us understand that Campion has no interest in bowing to the demands of a well-weathered genre. 

   At the same time, Campion and cinematographer Ari Wegner evoke images reminiscent of John Ford. Like the West of 1929, the movie's open landscapes brim with possibility. (The story is set in Montana but Campion shot the film in New Zealand.)

  The situation at the ranch takes a major turn when George marries Rose (Kirsten Dunst), a widow who runs a cafe where the ranch hands gather for a celebratory chicken dinner after a cattle drive. As the cowboys eat, Phil taunts Rose's son Peter (Kodi Smith-McPhee), a teenager who works in the cafe as a waiter and who makes paper flowers.

   We expect that Rose’s arrival on the ranch and the later arrival of Peter won't sit well with Phil, who makes no attempt to conceal his antagonism, hostility based on what he seems to view as the superiority of his self-sufficiency.

   Phil never misses an opportunity to display his contempt for Rose. He plays banjo and easily finishes a tune that Rose struggles to master on the grand piano George buys for her. George probably overestimates Rose’s gifts, perhaps because he’s relieved to break through the isolation in which he felt imprisoned.

   Smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, stomping across wooden floors, and refusing to bathe, Phil serves as a scalding, intensified emblem of what underlies the facade of the cowboy icon. He’s all gristle.

  Gradually, the film abandons Plemons' character to focus on Phil and Peter, a medical student Phil regards as effeminate and weak and who may represent the feminine side of the forces that Campion brings into collision.

  Studious and determined, Peter may not be all that he seems. He has no trouble dissecting the rabbits that he catches. He's not afraid of blood.

   Oddly, Phil begins to take to the young man, trying to school him in the ways of the ranch while Rose buckles under the pressure of a struggle she can’t win. She starts to drink.

  At one point, the governor (Keith Carradine) arrives for dinner, an awkward affair which Phil refuses to attend. He won’t bathe for company, declaring that he likes to stink.

   Cumberbatch’s performance towers over the rest of the cast, which is more or less what the story demands. 

   But Campion (The Piano, The Portrait of a Lady and more) isn’t out to lionize a ranch-bred homophobe. The story’s ominous simmer eventually reveals the acid that bubbles beneath its surface.

   Power of the Dog has plenty to say about manhood but it’s not an example of politically correct "wokeness." It is, above all, a Campion movie -- strange, engulfing, and defiant of the many tropes that defined the Hollywood Western, as well as a  substantial portion of American cultural mythology.

   If it's a Western at all, Power of the Dog is one that springs from primal urges that lurk and threaten. It's a film that insists on being felt as much as contemplated. And feel it, we do. 

   

'Jungle Cruise' loads up on action

   I'm skeptical about movies developed from theme park rides and Jungle Cruise did nothing to change my mind. But, hey, I’m realistic enough to know that such opposition only results in lost battles.

   Besides, the news isn't all bad. Though variable as a series, Pirates of the Caribbean produced some enjoyable entertainment.

   Considering that Disney has few if any equals when it comes to cross-marketing, it's hardly surprising that the company has forged ahead with Jungle Cruise, casting Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt in lead roles. 

   If you've seen the movie's trailer, you might think Jungle Cruise was going to be a brash take on African Queen, the 1951 movie that paired Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn. 

    No way. The movie seems closer in lineage to Raiders of the Lost Ark -- only tapped down a few pegs on the age and inventiveness scale.

    The result is a movie full of action but lacking any real distinction.

    The story follows Lily (Blunt) on an Amazon adventure (that's the river, not the shopping site) in which a rogue skipper (Johnson) agrees to use his barely functional vessel to guide the adventurous Lily on a search for The Tree of Life.

   Rejected by London's scientific establishment, Emily persists, exploring the river with her brother (Jack Whitehall), a foppish fellow who eventually discloses the reason for his refusal to marry the eligible women who have been pushed on him.

   Director Jaume Collet-Serra sets up a mildly antagonistic relationship between Johnson's Frank and Lily -- the kind we instantly know is destined to turn verbal sparring into love.

   Feigning shock at the sight of a woman wearing slacks, Frank calls Lily “Pants.” She retaliates by creating a diminutive for the word "skipper." She calls him “Skippy.”

   But Jungle Cruise hardly qualifies as a love story; instead, it uses the fabled river as an excuse to move from one action set piece to another.

   The movie takes place in the days before World War I but seldom feels anchored in any historical period -- unless its mid-20th Century Theme Park.

    Perhaps to up the funhouse ante,  the movie introduces a ghostly crew of conquistadors led by Aguirre (Ramon Martinez), an explorer who 400 years ago was cursed by the indigenous people of the Amazon for going on a killing rampage  after he was refused access to the Tree of Life. 

   If you like your movies seasoned with bugs and snakes -- CGI, of course -- you'll find plenty of those as well as the obligatory sequence in which Emily goads Frank into navigating his ramshackle boat through treacherous rapids.

   Frank, who has a pet jaguar named Proxima, harbors his own secrets and ambitions.

   The movie works overtime in its efforts to ensure us that we needn't take it seriously. Frank specializes in corny, eye-rolling jokes and the antic action seems more inspired by Chuck Jones than Disney.

   To add variety, the screenplay introduces a German nobleman played by Jesse Plemons, who demonstrates that he might be able to find a spot in Mel Brooks' s The Producers should anyone decide to take another run at that material.

   Johnson delivers Frank’s most caustic lines without ever making him less than likable. Blunt does her best to create a real character. Whitehall, a comic by trade, adds humor -- most of it pretty obvious.

   Nobly motivated, Lily wants to help mankind conquer disease, which differentiates her from Plemons' character who's only interested in acquiring power.

    Efforts at feminist assertion and sensitivity toward indigenous culture play second fiddle to the massive labors that apparently went into creating what surely was intended as an "exciting'' spectacle.

    I wouldn't say Jungle Cruise gives fun a bad name, but the characters and story are strictly off-the-rack. Put another way: Jungle Cruise isn’t up to the best Pirates of the Caribbean standards. 

    I leave it to you to decide exactly what that says about the world in which we find ourselves.

When the FBI invaded the Black Panthers

 

    If you approach Judas and the Black Messiah hoping to find a biopic about Fred Hampton -- a leader of the Chicago Black Panthers in the late 1960s — you'll be disappointed. In a way, director Shaka King gives us a biopic but not of the usual kind. 

    Judas and the Black Messiah stands as a portrait of a tense American period, one that encapsulates a particular '60s brand of activism, betrayal, idealism, organizing, and perhaps even delusion. It may be helpful to think of the movie as a biopic of a moment that once burned vividly in the nation’s consciousness.

    A charismatic speaker and determined organizer, Hampton (Daniel Kaluuya) was gunned down in a police raid in 1969. Invading Chicago police fired 90 shots; the Panthers who were gathered in Hampton's apartment fired none.

      The FBI had used an informer -- played here by LaKeith Stanfield — to infiltrate the Panthers and ultimately to help facilitate the raid that resulted in Hampton's death. Hampton was 21 when he died

     King builds his story around three characters. Kaluuya's Hampton, Stanfield's William O'Neal, and FBI agent Roy Mitchell (Jesse Plemons). At the risk of overstatement, I'd call that great casting. 

     All three are terrific. Kaluuya creates a fiery thoughtful Hampton. Stanfield does an exceptional job of portraying the conflicts faced by a man who came to care about Hampton and the cause and at the same time became the Judas of the title.  Plemons plays the kind of man who shields his ambitions behind a flat, down-to-earth manner.

     Once he established himself with the Panthers, O'Neal became the Panthers' chief of security, a position that gave him the access he needed to gather information on the Panthers.

      At first blush, it may be a bit much to think of Hampton as a black messiah, but the movie's religious connotations don't come from Hampton. They stem from then FBI director Herbert Hoover. 

     Hoover (Martin Sheen) thought the Black Panthers posed the greatest threat to the kind of American ideals he advocated. All that was needed to start a full-scale revolution was a black messiah. For Hoover, Hampton fit the bill.

      For those who don't remember, during the '60s, protestors of various stripes routinely branded the police as "pigs." There was no shortage of antipathy toward uniformed officers.  Still, it seems especially absurd now to hear Plemons' Mitchell equate the Panthers with the Klan.

      King makes it clear that the Panthers didn't stint on revolutionary rhetoric. They regarded themselves as revolutionaries in a Maoist mold. But King also shows that the Panthers organized schools, provided free breakfasts for kids, and tried to establish community health-care institutions.  And Hampton tried to cross racial and ethnic lines to form a Rainbow Coalition of activism.

     The movie also makes room for a tender but never overdone romance between Hampton and Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback), a young Panther who was committed to the cause.

    King and cinematographer Sean Bobbitt present the story in taut, leaping segments that evoke the fever-dream atmosphere of a moment in which the country was awakening to ideas of Black Power.

    As such, Judas and the Black Messiah stands as a memorable, powerful movie that leaves you wondering how Hampton might have evolved had he not been killed.

Despair, comedy and Charlie Kaufman

     Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York (2008) baffled many, but it had real pain, insight, and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a theater director obsessed with creating a masterpiece. Kaufman's new film, I'm Thinking of Ending Things, displays some of the same existential fatigue that marked Synecdoche. Ditto for the director's 2015 animated feature, Anamolisa.  
    I mention the past to point out that Kaufman knows his way around misery and because he's at it again.
     Some movies never allow a theme to emerge from the slagheap of their narratives. That can't be said of I'm Thinking About Ending Things: This odd, sometimes haunting, sometimes funny, sometimes baffling movie allows many themes to marinate in its dreary brine.
     Among them: mortality, aging, relationships, and the malleability of time. 
     All of this unfolds in a deadpan style that mirrors the internal state of characters who, as the title suggests, are living lives in which happiness and contentment seem as inaccessible as far-off galaxies.
     The aroma of defeat wafts through nearly everything in I'm Thinking of Ending Things, much of which is staged in a car in which two people (Jessie Buckley and Jesse Plemons) travel through a snowstorm. The car's windshield wipers become a kind of metronome, marking the passing of each gray minute.
     Although it's barely relevant, I'm Thinking of Ending Things does have a plot. Buckley's character -- sometimes called Lucia and sometimes called Lucy -- accompanies Plemons' Jake on a trip to meet Jake's parents, who live on an isolated farm. 
     Even before they arrive at their destination, Lucy wonders why she's wasting her time on a relationship she's sure has no future. Jake is nice. Jake is intelligent. But he's not The One.
     As played by Plemons,  we’re ready to agree with Lucy’s assessment. Jake seems to have accepted the monotony of life on an even keel.
     Both characters are smart, though, and they're not shy about telling each other what they know.
     When Lucy and Jake arrive at the farmhouse, the movie begins its full ascent into weirdness, becoming what might be considered a comedy of despair.   
     Watching Lucy encounter Jake's mother (Toni Collette) and her father (a very strange David Thewlis) leads to the kind of deadpan humor that won't appeal to everyone but which made me laugh.
    Even before this, signs of weirdness emerge: We're talking dead frozen sheep, a story about pigs that were eaten by maggots and, other suggestions that unspeakable horror lurks in the farm's rural isolation.
    At his point, the movie -- which is based on a novel by Iain Reid -- seems as if it might be springing from Lucy's mind as she imagines what life with David (and the inevitable association with his parents) might be like: Grimly comic images pervade a howling snowstorm as Lucy sees Jake’s parents in more youthful stages and in their decrepitude.
    Eventually, Jake and Lucy return to the road. Although the snow has worsened, Jake insists on stopping for ice cream at Tulsey Town, a stand that's inexplicably open in the middle of nowhere in the middle of a blizzard. 
     The ride also includes a discussion of  John Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence with Lucy offering a strident takedown of the movie, which some will recognize as Pauline Kael's review of the movie with its particular concentration on the work of actress Gena Rowlands. 
     Is this parody? Is it a dig at reviewers? Is it a comment on the way opinion tends to be absorbed and regurgitated in ways that obliterate individual obligations to respond?
     The evening culminates when Jake decides that he wants to show Lucy his high school, a place where we've already seen images of a janitor mopping up the hallways, watching TV (a movie supposedly directed by Robert Zemeckis), and snippets from a student production of Oklahoma.
     Jake, by the way, is a fan of musicals and these final scenes include a lovely dance duet and a further blurring of identities. Is Jake the janitor at a different stage of his life?
       Throughout all of this, Kaufman insists on giving his movie a feeling in which strangeness has become ordinary; weirdness absent any shimmering sense of mystery.
        What to think? I found myself digesting the movie in pieces. Yes to this bit. No to that. Unsure about something else.  
       I'll get back to you on the way the movie seems to invite interpretation but does little to confirm whatever meaning (or meanings) we might wish to read into it.
       In its overall impact, I'm Thinking of Ending Things accumulates around us like steadily falling snow, leaving drifts of recollected moments from which we must dig ourselves out.
      Good luck and see you when the weather clears.

A scattered 'Vice' falls short

Christian Bale scores as Dick Cheney and the supporting performances are mostly sharp, but director Adam McKay's look at the powerful veep offers too little fresh insight.

Regarded by many as the insidious power behind George Bush's empty presidential throne, Dick Cheney represents one of the strangest of political anomalies: Throughout his career, Cheney occupied a variety of power positions without ever revealing anything resembling an intriguing personality.

In excoriating Cheney, Vice, introduces us to an empty vessel of a man who tried (and mostly succeeded) at filling himself with power, either being near it or having it himself. It's a thesis of sorts, but Vice is too busy being clever to get much beyond that. At times, I wondered if the movie weren't more about its own comically rueful tone than it is about Dick Cheney.

Director Adam McKay delivers a free-wheeling, but not entirely fresh satirical indictment of Cheney and, only by inference, of many of the Neocons who supported similar positions.

McKay (The Big Short) leaves no doubt about where the movie stands. Vice opens with a howlingly drunk Cheney, as a young man, being pulled over by the cops. McKay then jumps to 9/11 as the vice president bypasses the president and gives the Defense Department authorization to shoot down any plane deemed a threat. This is followed by a quick view of real footage depicting a beleaguered America that would have fit nicely into a Michael Moore documentary.

The approach seems clear: Pieces of Cheney's career will be juxtaposed in ways that create a dizzying mosaic of bold strokes and blunt observations. Some work; some don't.

Still, audiences may want to see Vice for Christian Bale's impressive disappearing act of a performance as Cheney or for Sam Rockwell's amusing turn as an eager George Bush or for Steve Carrel's unashamedly conniving Donald Rumsfeld or for Amy Adam's no-nonsense portrayal of Lynne Cheney, the woman who evidently launched Cheney's career. She insisted that Cheney, then her fiancee, shed his wastrel ways after getting kicked out of Yale.

In his post-Yale days of the early '60s, Cheney had been spending his time in his home state of Wyoming working as a telephone lineman. When he got his second DWI, an embarrassed Lynne laid down the law; shape up or she'd find a more suitable partner. Cheney began to straighten himself out.

McKay's wild -- some might say "scattered" -- approach worked well in The Big Short, but it's overdone here with the movie racing through Cheney's resume: a stint as an intern to then-congressman Rumsfeld, a turn as Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff, 10 years in the House of Representatives, service as Secretary of Defense and, of course, an eight-year run as George W. Bush's vice president.

According to the movie, when Cheney took the vice presidential job he was determined to run the show. Desperate to have the more experienced Cheney as a running mate, Bush agreed to allow Cheney to take over the burden of matters such as foreign affairs and the military.

Vice takes a scalding -- and many will say appropriate -- view of Cheney's vice presidential activities, which include maneuvering the country into the Iraq war, justifying torture and ... well ... the list is long and, at times, as messy as McKay's movie.

McKay seems to have adopted a more-is-more approach to the material. At one point, Alfred Molina shows up as a waiter at a Washington restaurant who recites the menu, which for comic purposes has been turned into a checklist of Cheneyesque ideas. How about some "enhanced interrogation?" Care for some Guantanamo Bay?

The movie also features voice-over narration by Jesse Plemons and a last-minute reveal about why Plemons’ character is narrating the movie. At times, the narration makes it seem as if the movie is being read to us.

A set of fake end-credits rolls at a time when, or so the movie fantasizes, Cheney could have retired from public life in order to protect his gay daughter Mary (Alison Pill) from unwanted scrutiny. Fantasy, yes, but the closest the movie comes to saying anything positive about Cheney involves its depiction of his supportive relationship with Mary. Cheney tries his best to stand by her, although expedience eventually wins out.

You'll probably see Bale's name on the short list for a best-actor Oscar. Prosthetics and weight gain help, but he has captured Cheney's incipient smile, his understated venality and the matter-of-fact attitude he seemed to bring to even the most outrageous suggestions. He was a big believer in the unitary executive theory that concentrated power in the president's hands and minimized the need for any balance of power. The idea seemed to come to its fullest fruition after 9/11, the point at which the movie begins to bog down in expositional chores.

What's missing from all of this? New insight into Cheney, a politician whose career was punctuated by heart problems that become more prominent in the latter part of the movie.

Vice tells Cheney's story and, by extension examines what can be seen as an on-going deterioration of American political life. But the movie's dramatic potential is undercut by its view of Cheney as a political hollow man driven only by ambition and a thirst for power: He's pretty much the same guy from start to finish.

There's entertainment in McKay's movie and a variety of sharp-edged comic performances, but by the end, you may find yourself vainly waiting for McKay to pull the thematic string that unifies his jigsaw of a movie and keeps Vice from falling onto the side of the ledger where disappointments are recorded.