Known for his commitment to drastic body changes for a role, Christian Bale has now taken his transformative nature to its most grotesque limit: playing Dick Cheney. He’s the star of Adam McKay’s latest true-enough-to-be-depressing tale of the ’00s, Vice. Bale’s respective American Hustle and The Big Short co-stars Amy Adams and Steve Carell play Lynne Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, with Sam Rockwell resurrecting his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy performance as a George W. Bush that’s somehow exactly equal parts Rockwell and W. It’s like someone paused halfway through a photo morph.
The film’s first trailer sort of feels like a Funny or Die sketch without a punchline, but given the presidency in focus here, that’s probably about right. We’ll relive this nightmare as a new layer of our current nightmare when it hits theaters December 21.
