It’s a testimony, I suppose, to how far films have come in recent years that James Mangold’s Ford v Ferrari feels so retro. There was a time, not too long ago, that many American films looked like this: celebrations of fatherhood, male bonding, fast cars, and American gumption, made up of casts that were 98 percent male and 100 percent white. And, of course, that’s perfectly appropriate for this film, which is set in the world of car manufacturing and car racing in the mid 1960s. Not a lot of female or black executives at the old Ford Motor Company back then. But still…I was sort of thinking we had put these sorts of stories on the back burner, at least for a while, now that we’ve finally realized that there are so many other stories to tell. Guess not.

(I’m preemptively responding to an anticipated reaction to my review: Why didn’t you register this same complaint about Marty’s The Irishman, which also featured a predominantly white, predominantly male cast and you raved about? Because Scorsese’s film wasn’t celebratory or flag-waving. It was a serious, rigorous examination of male fragility and ego and an uncompromising work of art. Those will always be allowed.)

But let’s put aside my objection to Ford v Ferrari’s unapologetic squareness. There’s still lots to enjoy about the film, which provides us with two wonderful lead performances, exciting speed races, and car executives wearing some of the most beautifully tailored suits this side of Mad Men. (Come to mama, Lee Iacocca.)

Matt Damon plays Carroll Shelby, a celebrated race car driver who, thanks to a bum ticker, has to give up what he loves. He busies himself building and selling high-end sports cars, until he’s approached by two Ford execs—the aforementioned Iacocca (distractingly sexy Jon Bernthal), who’s a bit of a visionary, and the corporate toadie Leo Beebe (Josh Lucas), a bit of an empty suit—who have a proposition for him: Build a racecar that can beat Ferrari’s and do it at the celebrated Le Mans 24 hour auto endurance race. Oh, and do it in less than a year. Shelby agrees and immediately recruits the best racer he knows—the hot-headed, bull-headed, hard-headed (all the heads you can think of) British-American Ken Miles (Christian Bale). Miles does not play well with others and doesn’t want to be a pawn for any corporation but Shelby convinces him, prematurely it turns out, it’s going to be all about the race—no suits involved.

Some background on the Ford v. Ferrari feud. Ford’s sales were flagging and it was Iacocca, in fact, who suggested that Ford get into the sports car racing business, to change the company’s rep as stodgy and bolster flagging sales. At first, they attempted to buy Ferrari, only to discover were actually being played by old man Enzo (Remo Girone), who was just using Ford as leverage to raise the price on a Fiat merger. Enzo also insulted chairman Henry Ford II (Tracy Letts), implying he wasn’t the man his father was. Needless to say, it touched a nerve. Now beating Ferrari wasn’t just business, it was personal.

The film’s prevailing philosophy is that the corporatization of things screws stuff up, that it’s good old-fashioned individuality and ingenuity that is a true recipe for success. (Hard to argue with that.) But Ford execs, particularly Beebe, who clashed with Miles the minute he met him, keep getting in the way, suggesting different drivers and advising caution where reckless nerve is required. Shelby is a brash, cocky, charming good ol’ boy himself—a captain of the universe type. But compared to Miles, he’s a model citizen. So it’s his job to keep Miles and Beebe apart. (At one point, this literally involves locking Beebe in an office.)

Miles is a loveable character, despite his anger management issues. He’s a good father to a son who idolizes him (Noah Jupe), and a devoted, if unreliable, husband to his wife, Mollie (Caitriona Balfe). (The film does make some almost touchingly obvious attempts to give Mollie a personality beyond just “put-upon wife”—she gets one big tantrum scene. But then we quickly get back to the business of boys being boys.) Miles is also a preternaturally gifted race car driver and the film takes great pleasure in showing him behind the wheel of the car, cursing at himself, razzing his competitors, and anticipating every possible obstacle, wreck, and curve, always with eagle-eyed focus. Bales is great in the role; it’s fun to see him cut loose.

Ford vs. Ferrari is, more than anything else, a male love story—as these two talented and stubborn men fight, create fast cars, fight some more, and man-hug. As I put it on Twitter, it’s the “daddest film that ever dadded.” (It really should’ve been released on Father’s Day, not Thanksgiving.) But it’s entertaining, exciting, and slick, and give us a chance to watch two great, but very different, actors (one pure charm; one full method) do their thing. USA! USA!

I’m trying to pinpoint the exact moment that Vice, Adam McKay’s political satire about former Vice President Dick Cheney, lost me.

I could almost say the first few seconds, when the words “Based on a true story” flashed on the screen, followed by a caveat that it was as true as possible considering how notoriously secretive Cheney is, followed by a cheeky, “But we did our f***ing best” (they used the actual expletive, needless to say). Something about that meta joke brought to mind the similar frat-boy rib-elbowing of the Marvel film Deadpool. Probably not a good sign for a political biopic.

I’d been a fan of McKay’s The Big Short, although almost despite myself. That film was also filled with insider jokes, meta digressions, and flights of “look man, I’m a director!” indulgence. But I admired its moxie, its freewheeling spirit, and how it took an incredibly complicated subject (the housing collapse of 2008) and made it so lucid and digestible. So yes, that film had its off-putting moments, but I liked it all the same. I wasn’t going to write off Vice based on one innocent gag in the titles.

No, the moment Vice lost me was several scenes later. At this point, we’ve already established that Cheney (Christian Bale) got kicked out of Yale for excessive partying, and was drifting aimlessly from one manual labor job to next until he was berated by his soon-to-be wife, Lynne (Amy Adams), and told to get his act together or she’d leave him. He gets an internship in Congress, goes to work for Dick Rumsfeld (Steve Carell), which he parlays into a full-time job. He learned much of his cold, political machinations from Rumsfeld—although he would eventually surpass him in both the depth and sheer imagination of his corruption—but at this point, he’s still earnest enough to believe there might be some noble point to it all.

“What do we believe?” he asks Rumsfeld.

And Rumsfeld starts to laugh, “What do we believe?” he says. He keeps laughing, until he goes into his office, shuts the door, and continues his belly laugh. “What do we believe?” he sputters from behind the door. “Sheee-it!”

The villainy depicted in this scene was so cartoonish, Rumsfeld may as well have pulled off a mask and revealed his true self, Scooby-Doo style.

What this suggested about the film was that it wasn’t a serious examination of these (admittedly awful) men, but a reductive exaggeration: Political Corruption For Dummies.

And McKay was just getting started. Everything I didn’t like in The Big Short is doubled down on here, especially those break-the-fourth-wall digressions. I won’t name them all, but suffice it to say, when the narrator (Jesse Plemons) says, “We can’t just snap into a Shakespearean soliquoy that dramatizes every feeling and motivation,” you know damn well that Dick and Lynn are soon going to be seen in bed, conversing in iambic pentameter. A menu of human rights and constitutional norms that Cheney and co. violated are recited by an actual waiter (Alfred Molina, in a cameo): “We’re offering a Rendition tonight,” he says. “Oh, that sounds delicious!” Rumsfeld coos. And so on.

Maybe this kind of thing appeals to you. After all, lots of people love those Deadpool movies. But it’s still hard to justify the film’s smugness. One of its larger themes is that Americans are too stupid, too willfully distracted by the shiny objects of popular culture to notice that bad men are running the government. In that sense, Vice falls squarely in that brand of culture that encourages the viewer to feel superior to the unwashed masses: They are too dumb to see all of this was happening! We get the meta jokes! We understand the corruption! We’re the cool kids!

That being said, not all of Vice is horrible. Bale is truly wonderful as Cheney. The makeup is, yes, uncanny, but it’s Bale’s work—tight lipped, measured (almost monotone) in tone, filled with the vaguest bit of contempt for everyone he encounters, that truly captures Cheney’s spirit. The film’s most compelling argument is that Cheney, with his bland look of white male authority, had a way of making even his most far-fetched abuses of power seem measured and reasonable. Bale plays that well. (He’s also hilarious in the many heart attack scenes. Every time Cheney is felled by a heart attack—dude had a lot of them—he’s grimly resigned to it, but vaguely annoyed that it gets in the way of his ongoing villainy.)

As for the rest of the cast: Carrel does a surprisingly spot-on Rumsfeld impression (he nails that quick, lizard-like smile); Sam Rockwell is hilarious as a clueless man-child George W. Bush; and Adams, who plays Lynn as a helmet-haired, Junior League Lady Macbeth, is great, as ever. But I’m actually slightly enraged that the jowly Bill Camp (a great actor!) was cast in an extended cameo as Gerald Ford. Has McKay ever seen Gerald Ford?

So yeah, Vice worked my last nerve. It’s true, I turned on it early, but trust me when I say it did nothing to endear itself to me as it went on.