- Network: Showtime
- Series Premiere Date: Mar 15, 2013
- Season #: 1
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88Many expected to see Cheney not just screwed, but nailed to the wall. This documentary comes awfully close.
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80Cutler’s documentary The World According to Dick Cheney is a rousing piece of work.
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75Not a lot new here, but Cheney gets a fair hearing--even though a tougher one is occasionally warranted.
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70The details of Cheney's fall from grace in the waning years of the Bush administration are fascinating and narratively satisfying.
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67Here Cheney sounds like he's still campaigning for viewers' votes as he defends the decision to go to war against Iraq, declines to admit that waterboarding is a form of torture, and only struggles for an answer when he is asked to name his main faults.
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60The World According to Dick Cheney has some chilling moments, from his dispassionate description of waterboarding ("It creates a sensation of drowning") to his 9/11 narrative, in which he takes responsibility for having authorized the shooting down of Flight 93 if it approached Washington. What it doesn't have is a lot of navel-gazing.
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60The documentary doesn’t fawn over its subject. War skeptics get plenty of time to explain why they think Cheney was wrong.... Conversely, when the filmmakers make an effort to humanize Cheney, he doesn’t give them much to work with.
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50The World According to Dick Cheney has interesting insights and revealing moments, but for critics who long to confront Mr. Cheney it may prove dissatisfying, because it allows him to make astonishing assertions without direct contradiction or follow-up questions.
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50The strength of the documentary is that although it is grounded in an extensive interview with its subject, it is not hagiography. Writers like Woodward and Gellman weigh in with considered and not always flattering opinions about Cheney. That said, noticeable by their absence as interview subjects in the film are Rice and, in particular, Bush.
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42The World According to Dick Cheney instead is nuts-and-bolts bland and overly deferential.
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40There is no sense of who Cheney is, beyond his restatements.
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40The film is a sturdy but ultimately stifled exercise in the most polite methods of interrogation--to which its subject is entirely immovable and not prepared to surrender anything, even a smile.