‘Vice Is Broke’ Review: A Messy Documentary Portrait of a Media Empire’s Rise and Fall

Many great investigative pieces have been written about Vice, the publication that had a spectacular rise as well as an explosive collapse, culminating in the mass layoffs of hundreds of employees earlier this year and subsequent attempts by those like co-founder Shane Smith to save it. Eddie Huang’s documentary, “Vice Is Broke,” is not going to be one of them.

This is something that the director, a former employee and host for the company who says he had to fight to receive full compensation for the work he did, would likely agree with. Early on in his documentary, Huang makes clear that he isn’t interested in following conventions of the form by relying on the familiar pattern of cutting to talking heads and recountings of what happened.

Instead, he sits down with a collection of former employees one-by-one to talk with them in extended interviews about their experiences and what they remember about what made the publication such a special place to them, before it completely collapsed before their eyes.

The result is a documentary that gets at some of the chaos that defined the company while often finding itself distracted and sidetracked away from some bigger, perhaps more important questions. There are more good interviews than bad that Huang conducts, and his righteous outrage over the way he as well as his colleagues were treated resonates, though it never is quite able to shake the sense that a more focused hand guiding the documentary could have gone a long way.

The film, which premiered Thursday at the Toronto International Film Festival, starts from the early days of Vice and how its beginning was already defined by rather sketchy practices. As we hear in a conversation between Smith and filmmaker Spike Jonze, who was once a creative director at the company, the latter thinks it’s pretty bad actually that they basically stole the name from Voice of Montreal, a nonprofit magazine meant to support struggling people.

This sets the stage for the tracing of the print publication going from being considered one of the most unique voices in media to a full empire with shows and massive business partnerships. Some of this focuses on the major players, including Smith, who we briefly see social media messages from, while also approaching everything through the personal lens of Huang. It’s as much about the director reckoning with his past and career as it is about the story of what befell Vice Media. 

This is, to put it lightly, a rather mixed bag. There is a refreshing candidness to the interviews that Huang conducts at most times, with employees talking about how much they loved doing creative work even as they still felt conflicted about the leadership. Where there is much that remains to be desired is in how the film relies on more than just a passing knowledge of Vice.

At times, Huang will reference details about the company or the way things unfolded without caring to provide much context. Even for those who read the site or watched their videos, there is an information gap that “Vice Is Broke” never seeks to close. While Huang does not need to use conventional filmmaking approaches by any means, some more thought into his documentary’s construction would serve it well so that it could do so without leaving so much skimmed over. 

The strongest interviews are the ones that we get with the publication’s more veteran journalists — particularly Simon Ostrovsky who covered the Russo-Ukrainian War in 2014 and 2015, during which he was also held hostage and tortured by pro-Russian separatists. In addition to being one of the most substantive conversations of the film, it also provides the greatest insights into how Vice was struggling to do serious news coverage after years of more sensational video reports from foreign countries that drew plenty of deserving criticism. Huang skewers the company for this, offering his own perspective and showing clips from his show where he even made fun of their focus on telling the most salacious stories they could find. 

This makes it a little perplexing why there is one central interview where he seems to hold back and offer excuses. That comes with Gavin McInnes, the co-founder of Vice who is now a prominent face of the far-right organization the Proud Boys and a poisonous voice of hate. His shadow looms large (while that of his genitals we oddly see multiple times looming smaller) over the documentary and it makes sense Huang would address his role at Vice. He remains a part of its story and ignoring his part in its founding would be a grave oversight. 

What is strange is that Huang decides to interview him and, aside from a few moderately tough questions, mostly feels like he’s soft-pedaling. They do briefly arm wrestle over the way that McInnes speaks about women, which Huang wins, but it still feels like the founder gets off easy.

This is especially true when Huang keeps waving away the founder’s rhetoric and behavior as being that of an “edgelord” rather than a violent, hateful bigot. He repeatedly implies McInnes is a character who is just pretending to truly believe these things, but this is a distinction without a meaningful difference. As others say, the early days of Vice and the supposed “jokes” that were being made can be cover for real hate. 

After this rather egregious misstep, the film then starts to provide greater insights about the final years of Vice and what it was that the company was doing to stay afloat. In addition to not glossing over the wild spending habits of Smith and how much he would lose gambling, the more interesting nuggets come when we get into how Vice was pivoting to branded content.

It was doing so in ways that they withheld even from the reporters, including with a piece on camel racing that was done in partnership with a Saudi Arabian marketing company. There could be a whole, and frankly better, documentary about these elements of Vice that could take the time to provide a more comprehensive analysis of what the company’s fall now represents. 

“Vice Is Broke” often uncovers some of this information, but it doesn’t do so with the full rigor that a subject like this requires. For every interview there is with a journalist offering more of this, there is one that just meanders with a notorious influencer that should have probably been cut.

In a way, that’s a rather fitting encapsulation of Vice itself. There was good work done by good people working in tough circumstances who were cut loose as the company chased nonsense and then kicked them to the curb. This film isn’t the documentary they deserve, but it’s maybe the one Vice does.