VICE IS BROKE - Mark Reviews Movies

Vice Is Broke, Mubi

Follow on Facebook | Follow on Twitter | Become a Patron

Review by Mark Dujsik | August 28, 2025

He may try to convince us otherwise, but Eddie Huang is very angry. The filmmaker has every right to be, too, because he makes a good case that he was exploited and misused by a company for which he worked. Plus, they technically owe him hundreds of thousands of dollars for that work. Vice Is Broke frames itself as an exposé of the eponymous media company, which filed for bankruptcy in 2023 and laid off a lot of employees.

Apparently, it recently returned to creating content, but there's no way Huang could have known or even suspected that while making this documentary. He assumed it was all but dead as a business, apart from those still keeping the office warm and the lawyers ensuring that people stuck to their non-disclosure agreements. Some of the interviewees here, who did work for Vice at one point or another and left for one reason or another during the company's three-decade-long run, surely are hampered in what they can say because of those legal agreements. It wouldn't be surprising to learn that some of them aren't even able to mention that fact.

They still have stories they can tell, and most of them don't paint a good portrait of the media company, which started as a print magazine and moved into the online realm to basically create an entire style of journalism. Well, some of it was legitimate journalism, but it's probably fair to say even more of it only looked like the real deal.

Huang, for example, juxtaposes one Vice segment here, in which a crew records a gang talking about how they perform cannibalism in Liberia, with his hero Anthony Bourdain's trip to that same country around the same time. Bourdain walks through the street, smiling at and being greeted by vendors at a local market. Unless he or those vendors are hiding something quite nefarious, it's a safe bet to assume that the Vice piece isn't to be taken as an accurate depiction of the entirety of the country.

We all know these kind of video segments by now, because they were the rage at the height of Vice's popularity, and Huang himself, who had a travel show for the company's TV network, shows himself doing an amusing parody of that style. He hunches down, covers his face, and starts whispering about how dangerous the place is. Some reporter, he jokes, came here and died three times.

Huang is funny. Being a comedian is, after all, one of his many roles in a multi-hyphenated career that also includes chef, TV personality, and author. This is his first documentary, and it, too, could be described in several ways.

It's the biography of a company, a takedown of some of the people and business practices who made that company successful, a nostalgic trip to the days of this kind of journalism, and a collection of some planned or spontaneous comedic bits. In that last category, Huang dresses up as TV presenter Guy Fieri to do one interview and arm-wrestles Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes to determine if women would be happier not working, as McInnes argues, or shouldn't have to follow the advice of some weirdo who flashes his genitals for no reason.

That McInnes interview, by the way, is strange—and not mainly, which is some kind of accomplishment, because the guy does pull out his penis within minutes of meeting Huang. Since leaving Vice (The only time he seems genuinely uncomfortable and doesn't want to speak his mind is when asked the circumstances, which says something about his say-anything image), McInnes has had a different career. Huang doesn't go into it in specifics, which is a shortcoming generally in the movie, but McInnes has basically become a far-right-wing firebrand. Huang assumes it must be a long joke, and no matter how many times McInnes says that he actually believes the things he says, the filmmaker doesn't seem willing to accept that as a basic fact.

Huang is far less generous about Shane Smith, another Vice founder, whom a few people here describe as a modern-day P.T. Barnum for his ability to sell people on the weird and, once the company started making sponsored content that looked like journalism, being sold on anything. Maybe the reason the director doesn't want to believe the worst about McInnes but is so quick to assume that about Smith goes back to the beginning of this review. Huang is mad because of how Vice treated him, and Smith was in charge of the company when that happened. It is odd, though, that this results in the filmmaker accommodating the founder of a violent right-wing militia, in part because he doesn't have a personal grudge against the guy.

When Huang sticks to the case and maintains some consistency with his ire, Vice Is Broke does make a fine argument that the company started with worthy intentions, got too big for its own good, lost its way, and ended up hurting a lot of people in the process. Huang's personality does come through the movie, which is to its benefit, but maybe, it might have worked better without the filmmaker trying to put on an air of journalistic objectivity. If Huang is as angry as he should be about this situation, we couldn't blame him for showing it.

Back to Home

Buy Related Products