Brendan James offers a sorta-quasi-defense (I have no stance as yet, though I might see it tomorrow):
The negative reviews instead tend to focus on McKay’s job as writer and director. One of the most common complaints relates to his understanding of politics and the resulting portrayal of Cheney. A representative critique comes from national security writer and onetime Iraq War supporter Fred Kaplan, who declares that the director is out of his depth: “McKay reportedly read some very good books about Cheney . . . but his own grasp of Washington politics is thin.” Kaplan calls the film an example of Lenin’s term “infantile leftism” (a phrase that does not mean what he thinks it does). In this reading, Vice “fails as history” by treating Cheney & Co. as power-hungry opportunists rather than sincere ideological mandarins. He cites a scene in which a young Cheney asks Rumsfeld, “what do we believe?” which leaves the latter doubled over laughing:
"The film portrays Cheney’s political ambition as entirely cynical, geared toward nothing but power for its own sake. […] In fact both men, especially Cheney, were deeply conservative. To discount their ideological impulses gives them too little credit for their egregious actions."
Sure, the cynicism in that scene is played up for laughs. But the fact is that, like Rumsfeld (once known as a pain in Nixon’s ass for pushing for an end to the Vietnam War), Cheney embraced a jumble of principles and positions throughout his entire career. He was, at different moments in his life, a budget hawk, a "deficits-don't-matter" guy, a practitioner of realpolitik, and, finally, an insatiable warmaker. In a strange pattern, each ideological shift happened to enable a new way for him to advance his career, enrich his allies, and expand US hegemony.
― resident hack (Simon H.), Monday, 7 January 2019 19:50 (five years ago) link