There is a specific nostalgic jolt to documentaries that capture the rise and fall of fleetingly popular phenomena. Whether it’s Small Potatoes: Who Killed The USFL?, ESPN’s 30 For 30 about the flash-in-the-pan football league, or Hulu’s 2021 exposé WeWork: Or The Making And Breaking Of A $47 Billion Unicorn, audiences get a kick out of reliving a halcyon bygone moment when some upstart idea briefly burned brightly—knowing full well that its end is coming soon. Like with James Cameron’s Best Picture-winning blockbuster, these documentaries offer the promise of a seemingly unsinkable Titanic hitting its inevitable iceberg, giving viewers a chance to savor the schadenfreude found in its specular failure. Vice Is Broke, Eddie Huang’s autopsy of the once-powerful media brand that declared bankruptcy in 2023, would seem to provide comparable pleasures.
A former host of the Viceland series Huang’s World, the celebrated chef/author/personality knew the company’s inner workings, befriending its executives and witnessing its implosion up close. But what’s intriguing about Vice Is Broke is that Huang approaches this familiar rise-and-fall narrative from a different perspective. Both angry at Vice for screwing him out of money he says the company owed him and mournful at the loss of a brand whose impudent ethos he cherished, Huang comes to praise and bury this toppled empire. Neither approach entirely works.
Huang, who wrote and directed the 2021 sports drama Boogie, and whose 2013 memoir Fresh Off The Boat became the launching-off point for the ABC sitcom, puts himself front and center, narrating Vice Is Broke but also serving as its star. Mocking the drier, more formulaic tone of comparable docs, like WeWork, he flaunts the fact that he’s not a journalist, positioning himself as a straight-shooting regular guy—like his hero, and fellow celebrated chef, Anthony Bourdain—as he tries to explain why Vice mattered before ultimately selling its soul. Brandishing his bonafides as an uncompromising iconoclast, Huang recalls Bourdain’s warning about not acquiescing to deep-pocketed corporate interests. According to Huang, the No Reservations star told him, “Eddie, at every turn, they’re gonna ask you to bite the dick. And no matter what you do, never bite the dick.”
“And I didn’t,” Huang informs us, pleased.
That brash, self-aggrandizing anecdote sets the stage for Vice Is Broke‘s entertaining but shallow examination of Vice, which started as an edgy mid-1990s Montreal magazine before moving to New York near the start of the 21st century, quickly establishing itself as the Bible of youth culture. Providing frank sex advice while candidly dissecting dating, drugs, race, and class, Vice was irreverent and unapologetically provocative. As former editor-in-chief Jesse Pearson describes the magazine’s M.O., “I always refer to it as, like, hyper-intelligent valley girl. Like, you know you can drop continental philosophy, but you also say ‘totes.'” Vice‘s attitude made it impossibly cool to its receptive audience of budding tastemakers and influencers, and soon the company expanded into documentary series and digital verticals. Vice Media won Emmys and was at one point valued at $5.7 billion. Run by the P.T. Barnum-like Shane Smith, who became a symbol of a new, hipper type of thought leader, Vice felt (perhaps unfortunately) like the future of media.
Vice Is Broke is strongest when it talks honestly about Vice Media’s strengths and weaknesses. Speaking with several people who were instrumental to the company’s legacy, like Amy Kellner (the magazine’s first female writer), Huang doesn’t shy away from Vice‘s sometimes disturbing sexist and racist tendencies—its bro-heavy, “just joking” style of performative outrageousness. Once Smith’s team started branching out into actual news reporting, traveling to different countries to chronicle dangerous gangs and similar “exotic” horrors, they were rightly accused of sensationalizing and othering foreign cultures. Huang even includes the well-known clip, from the 2011 documentary Page One: Inside The New York Times, in which late Times reporter David Carr dresses down Smith and his fellow poseurs for their naivety about international affairs—a pivotal turning point that humiliated Vice Media and, in turn, forced Smith to get more thoughtful about its journalism.
But for as much as Huang tries to go for a more freewheeling approach, treating his interviews like off-the-cuff conversations taking place in bars and restaurants, Vice Is Broke isn’t that intimate or revealing. The closest the film gets to anything resembling Vice‘s no-holds-barred daring is a one-on-one between Huang and company co-founder Gavin McInnes, who left in 2008, later helping to form the dangerous far-right group the Proud Boys. Convinced McInnes’ regressive views are all an act to garner a response—not unlike Vice in its prime—Huang tries to get him to come clean, which proves unsuccessful and not especially compelling. The filmmaker knows a thing or two about being outspoken (Rolling Stone once declared Huang “The Bad Boy Of Pork Buns”) but he doesn’t have the chops as an interviewer to challenge McInnes.
In its later reels, the documentary digs into Vice‘s ignominious collapse, which becomes a chilling metaphor for the modern struggles across the media landscape. Crumbling ad dollars, an inability to monetize the web, the fickleness of a distracted populace: The financial headaches that keep plenty of media executives up at night all contributed to Vice Media’s downfall. Smith tried different tactics to keep Vice afloat, each of them more desperate than the next. (Those fascinated by such inside-baseball stories will be especially interested in Vice Is Broke‘s exploration of the company’s vain pursuit of “traffic assignment” and its flirtation with tired legacy brands that represented everything Vice once railed against.)
Huang fancies his film a raw, personal response to Vice‘s fall from grace. But not unlike the quickie obituary-docs such as WeWork, Vice Is Broke is largely a superficial once-over. Part of the problem is that, as angry as Huang is at Smith for not paying him, he still seems weirdly enamored of Vice‘s pseudo-rebellious spirit. Too often, he talks to Vice contributors who also felt cheated by Smith—an indication that Huang wants to grind an axe more than examine a corpse. It’s yet another reason to miss David Carr’s sharp, fearless truthtelling. Just think what he would have done with this story.
Director: Eddie Huang
Release Date: August 29, 2025 (Mubi)
