Author's judgement: 
It is necessary to have a strong stomach to digest well the bitter pills that this week's film offers us: Vice – The man in the shadows, directed and written by Adam McKay. It is a true story, inspired by real events before, during and after the presidency of George Bush Jr. where the main protagonist is not, as it seems, the President of the United States but his deputy Dick Cheney (interpreted in an excellent way by Christian Bale). It is precisely his figure, his public and private life at the center of the story where we read very well the rise to power of a man who, while remaining precisely in the shadows, in fact becomes the real owner of the executive to the detriment of a President who does not shine for his abilities.
The whole film takes us back over the years, to the dark and dramatic period of international terrorism, the apocalypse of the Twin Towers and all that followed. We return to the presidential elections of 2000, when the Republican candidate Bush wins the confrontation with his Democratic opponent al Gore by a handful of votes (exactly about 540). Many doubts were raised about the illegitimacy of that vote, later resolved with a sentence of the Supreme Court which awarded the victory to Bush. The following year there was the September 11 attack which was followed by the war in Afghanistan and, subsequently, the invasion of Iraq, believed to be directly involved and accused of possessing weapons of mass destruction which were never found. In this environment, with all the political as well as human background, Cheney moves in the shadows (not even that much), as skilled as he is unscrupulous in the wise and violent use of the power he can exercise. The direct confrontation with Bush is decisive when he proposes that he become his deputy for the US presidency, which he accepts on the sole, simple condition that he is the holder of the most important government powers, effectively emptying the weight of the incumbent president.
The film holds up very well to the narrative time despite the fact that the majority of viewers are well aware of what really happened and how fraught with consequences the choices of the Bush administration were. The cast is excellent and nothing else is needed to describe the human and political aspects of a role, that of the deputies, whatever they may be, which has always been of great importance in the public life of great leaders. For those of the readers who are "experts" in a great classic of streaming television such as House of Cards he will not fail to observe the many similarities between reality and fiction, when the boundaries of one often merge with those of the other and vice versa. The director, moreover, has already had some success with his previous work (where he also won an Oscar for the screenplay) with a story about the 2007 financial crisis also based on real events. At the end of the screening, that vague sense of indigestion remains, precisely, which assails when one realizes that unfortunately, often, politics, especially at such high levels, is too important to be left in the hands of those who are either too inexperienced or too selfish for holding responsibilities bigger than them. This film is worth watching, not only to remember what happened just a few years ago but also to remember how politics can sometimes be ugly, dirty and bad.
