Several times in the past four years, I’ve thought to myself, “I wish Jon Stewart were still on the air.” Nothing against Trevor Noah, who has proven to be a more than able successor (and, arguably a better host for this moment in time). But it was Stewart who started this format, and his brand of snark, moral clarity, menschiness, and righteous anger is something we all could use more of these days.

Then again, if Stewart’s new film, Irresistible, is any indication of the kind of content he would’ve been producing during the Trump years, all I can say is: Whew, dodged a bullet.

The whole point of the film, if I’m following it correctly, is that money in politics is bad and that our Red State/Blue State narrative is driven by the press and political strategists and serves to divide us further. Whoa . . . mind blown.

In that sense, the film has something in common with Adam McKay’s Vice, which is also bad: It thinks we’re all simpletons when it comes to the inner workings of politics and that we need to have it explained to us in the most condescending way possible.

In a curious move, Stewart doesn’t focus on a Republican political strategist, as one might expect, but a Democratic one, namely Gary Zimmer, played by longtime Stewart collaborator Steve Carell.

Here’s the setup: Fresh off his losing work on the Hillary Clinton campaign, a bummed out Gary sees a YouTube video of a progressive-minded Marine vet, Jack Hastings (Chris Cooper), lecturing his mayor about immigrant’s rights at a town hall in Deerlaken, Wisconsin. Gary sees Jack as the Great Democratic Hope, a farmer, no less, with small town values, who can talk about Democratic policies while driving a pick-up truck and wielding a gun. So he recruits him to run for mayor.

But if, say, Tucker Carlson had written the script and not Stewart, he couldn’t have done a better job of parodying a Democratic strategist.

Gary thinks of himself as a good guy, but mostly he likes to win. He thinks all people can, and should, be manipulated. He assumes the folks who live in small towns are idiots who don’t know what’s good for them (but he’s here to tell them). He tries to affect being a regular guy, ordering a “burger and a Bud” when he rolls into Deerlaken (he doesn’t know that the Bud is a screw top). He’s a city slicker snob, who refers to green beans as haricot verts, is afraid of dogs, and freaks out when he doesn’t have WiFi.

Yes, there’s a Republican strategist, too, Faith Brewster (Rose Byrne), a gorgeous killer in stiletto heels and a power suit, and in a plot point ripped from a thousand rom-coms before it, she and Gary can’t decide if they want to murder each other or rip each other’s clothes off.

But Faith is a vague and stereotypical character, played amusingly by the ever-welcome Byrne, of course. Gary, on the other hand is the subject of the film’s closest observation—and scorn. He even hits on Jack’s beautiful 28-year-old daughter, Diana (Mackenzie Davis), not realizing that he’s making a fool of himself. Again and again, Gary stumbles because he’s too high on his own supply of superiority to see what’s in front of him.

There was a period, right after Trump was elected, when The New York Times did story after story about salt-of-the-earth heartland Trump voters who were decent people who simply felt betrayed or forgotten by Washington. One such story was fine, but they kept coming, again and again, usually set at homey diners—and they seemed to willfully ignore some of the more disturbing aspects of Trump’s appeal. Irresistible sort of seems like the cinematic version of those stories. (Why it’s called Irresistible—a title created in a focus group if ever I’ve heard one—is anyone’s guess.) I thought Stewart was more interesting and sophisticated than that. But maybe, much like Gary, he just thinks we’re the ones lacking nuance.

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.