Contrary to the old saying, history isn’t written by the winners — if it were, nobody would be flying Confederate flags. Sometimes, as in the case of Adam McKay’s rapid-fire satirical biography “Vice,” it’s written by sharp and angry storytellers on the opposite end of the political spectrum.
In chronicling the life of former Vice President Dick Cheney, McKay aims to repeat the formula he deployed in his 2015 hit “The Big Short.” In that film, McKay depicted a horrendous failure of policy — the corruption of the U.S. mortgage market, and how when the housing bubble burst it took a lot of the American economy with it — through a comic presentation of facts and a dose of righteous fury.