Adam McKay’s Vice was already a weird movie, positioning the dark rise to power of evil villain Dick Cheney as something that may or may not have been a comedy and packing the saga with a bunch of funny actors playing un-funny political assholes. One thing that would’ve made the movie even weirder than it was, though, was a musical number that got cut out at the last minute, as lamented by editor Hank Corwin. He told The Hollywood Reporter a few months ago that it was a “really entertaining” sequence that McKay “directed the heck out of,” but it had to be cut out because it “weighed the film down at the wrong time.”
Now, the musical number has been released on YouTube, and it… is kind of a lot to take in. Christian Bale’s Cheney doesn’t sing, but it does have Brittany Howard from the Alabama Shakes accompanying Steve Carell’s Donald “Rummy” Rumsfeld as he explains to young-ish Cheney how Washington D.C. really works. It’s extremely silly out of context, playing like an overly confident version of the guy singing the political parody songs in “Mr. Lisa Goes To Washington.” Considering that the guy who edited the film says it didn’t even work in context, it seems like cutting it was the right choice.
[via THR]