Vice: Adam McKay doesn’t hide at all his allegiances in this film, and it’s quite a feat to make a film that turns out to be this entertaining and (maybe) informative about a pair of despicable (or, at the very least, portrayed as such) characters. The film does get a tad overlong, but its structure and tone are a great boon: the film jumps in time and its narrator comments, reminds and explains quite a few more obscure points (it’s a great work by editor Hank Corwin); this sum almost creates an absurdist tone to the story. The performances are another factor: Christian Bale does a great job mimicking the speech patterns of the man (the make-up job by Greg Cannom, Kate Biscoe and Patricia Dehaney’s team is superb and helps a lot to create the character, or its illusion of reality), but also creating a window at what makes him tick. Amy Adams is likewise in very fine shape as the strong woman behind the strong man. Sam Rockwell creates a fine clueless buffoon of a character, as well.