[7.6/10] We want our villains to be lively and hateable. We want them to twirl their mustaches. We want them to show their evil loudly in public and harshly in private. We want them to be as thoroughly repugnant, devoid of human connection, that it’s clear to anyone watching how profoundly they’ve lost their way. Sure, we like a good complicated bad guy in our stories these days, but moviegoers still wants to be thrilled, chilled, and know exactly whom to root against.

Vice is a two-hour antidote to that want. It is a paean to the banality of evil -- half exposé, half resentful hagiography for a man who, on the film’s account, did more lasting damage to the world than any big screen nogoodnik imaginable, and did it all by being quiet, unnoticed, and boring.

It would be far too much to call Vice an admiring portrait of Dick Cheney. Writer-director Adam McKay clearly despises the man and all that he’s wrought, to where his film is as much a laundry list of misdeeds and power-grabs as it is a sort of unitary executive bildungsroman. McKay makes his perspective clear, both in the text and in the many direct asides to the audience in the film, which gives the viewer plenty of room to be wary of cherry-picking and slant, but which also puts the director’s cards on the table early.

And yet, there’s a sort of begrudging respect beneath the disdain at the core the film. McKay and company seem as impressed as they are aghast at what their subject accomplished despite little discernible personality and negative charisma. Vice depicts a bloodless coup, an assemblage of power for power’s sake, that flew under the radar despite being at the apex of government because it was mired in bureaucratic tedium, unshowy secrecy, and spotlight-shirking calculation. Even before Vice’s Cheney turns to the camera and delivers his A Few Good Men self-justification and non-apology, there’s a sense of bedrudging admiration next to palpable contempt at the way this superficially uninteresting guy remade our government in his image, due in no small part to seeming so thoroughly uninteresting.

That also’s the film’s grand warning. It presents the stone foundations of democracy and the firm protections of civil liberties crumbling unnoticed because the methods for their undoing are too mundane to grab people’s attentions. While the film’s depiction of partisan food fights and focus group subject more interested in the latest Fast and the Furious movie than in good governance comes off like a hoary, “get off my lawn” critique of political engagement, Vice is chiefly focused on the evil that prospers when good men do nothing, because the bad men are too steeped in jargon and wonkery to warrant much notice or care.

At the same time, it draws out the startling contrast in the staid environments in which these grand decisions are made, the lifeless conference rooms, generic offices, and bland pronouncements, with the hellfire, death, and destruction that burst forth halfway across the world. Like McKay’s last feature, The Big Show, one the biggest strengths in Vice is its editing. Nothing conveys the film’s point-of-view than when editor Hank Corwin shows the prosaic stroke of a pen or an eminently domestic family meal and juxtaposes them with the unflinching horrors of war and consequence. It emphasizes the distance between the pristine-if-unflashy world that Vice’s protagonist lives in with the muddy, thorny aftermath for the people who have to bear the brunt of his decisions.

That’s good because Vice is anything but subtle. Between the film’s narrator (who at least serves a thematic purpose in the story), the numerous title cards and chyrons, and the same type of explanatory segments used in The Big Short, the film is as much a visual essay, directly telling the audience what’s happening and how and why, and what McKay & Co. think the import is, as it is a self-contained story. To call Vice didactic would be a severe understatement, since it not only aims to straight up educate its audience, but resorts to visual over-explained visual metaphors that make The Simpsons’s Behind the Music parody look restrained.

Still, the style, while occasionally eye roll-worthy, mostly works for the film. There’s something to be said for adapting the life of such an ordinary-seeming, matter of fact man with such bombast and directness. And sometimes McKay’s predilection for playing with the form pays off, earning big laughs with a “what if” cut-to-credits and a Shakespearean interlude immediately undercut with the boring and mildly awkward reality. As amusing and showy as these moments are, they serve the film’s purposes, showing how different things might have been for want of a nail and how movies like this one dress up the decisions that change lives in the flourishes of the grandiose but which more often come down to less-than-dynamic, unphotogenic functionaries simply saying “yeah, sure.”

As much as Vice laments the consequences of that ocean of “yeah, sure”s, and harbors clear scorn for the man who uttered them, it also takes some pain to humanize Dick Cheney. It depicts him as a loving father who’s mercenary to a fault but who draws a “line in concrete” in front of his gay daughter, whom he loves and accepts unconditionally, regardless of the liability she creates for a conservative politician. And it shows him seeking power not out of some personal greed or avarice, but to live up to the best hopes of a wife that he loves, and with whom he has an ironclad partnership that balances out both some of his softer inclinations and his lack of telegenic spark.

That’s born out by the performances in the film, which toe the line between impersonation and parody on the one hand and live-in human being on the other. Christian Bale completes another startling transformation, not only gaining the girth (and the talented makeup team) to represent Cheney visually, but slipping so completely into the persona that you nigh-instantly forget that this same guy played Batman six years ago. Amy Adams more than holds the line as Lynne, Dick’s ambitious, rock-ribbed equal who communicates the conviction and determination that catalyzes and sustains the ascent at the center of the picture. Turns from Steve Carell and Sam Rockwell as recognizable figures from the Bush administration occasionally conjure up visions of a darker-edged Michael Scott or the mocking tones of producer Will Ferrell’s impression, but eventually blend undetectably into the world of the film.

It’s a world where elaborate symbolic sequences of board games and teacups are used to make sure the audience is keeping up with each development, where each of Cheney’s “greatest hits” is touched on and explicated, and where McKay attempts to attribute much, if not most, of the world’s problems in the last two decades or so one man and his particular brand of political machine. But it’s also a world where the film’s greatest villain offers no theatrical boasts or colorful schemes or boo-inducing fervor. Instead, he packs a head-down cynical pragmatism, a stultifying bearing and affect, and the slow grind of mundane, byzantine politicking that rarely makes for great stories, but which despite that, or because of it, can remake the world.