Adam McKay's scathing, blackly funny examination of ex-Vice President Dick Cheney has received mixed reviews in the States; some undoubtedly based in political bias, and some due to complaints that after a two-hour film, the audience still doesn't fully understand the mind and motivations of Dick Cheney.

Allow me to counter those criticisms with one simple fact: Dick Cheney literally shot a person in the face and had them apologise for causing him and his family inconvenience. There simply is no understanding the mind and motivations of a person like that.

Of course, that is one of the smallest examples of how Cheney became a master puppeteer, who inflicted colossal amounts of violence while dodging blame. With dashes of his now trademark sense of meta satire, writer/director McKay charts his questionable command grab in the moments after 9/11; his search for 'legal' ways to trash the Geneva Convention; and his deliberate manipulation of the American people to support the invasion of a country that had nothing to do with 9/11.