Eddie Huang set out to tell the story of a media phenomenon that shaped him, but his film ends up circling the problem it wants to solve rather than cracking it open.[1] The documentary carries energy and access and the feel of lived experience, yet it rarely answers the plain question that hovers over every scene: what really broke Vice.[1]
The more the film leans on Huang’s charisma and autobiography, the more it drifts from the structural failures that turned a brash success story into a cautionary tale.[1] There is a nervous system running through the movie that hums with personal grievance and half answered questions, and that tension can be fascinating for a while until it becomes evasive.[1] Huang the narrator is lively and often funny, but Huang the reporter too often turns the camera back on himself, borrowing the old Vice impulse to center the performer and leaving the actual postmortem sketchy.[1]
To understand why that is frustrating, it helps to step back from the film and remember the arc that made the company a magnet for believers and skeptics alike.[2] Vice began as a scrappy print magazine in Montreal in the nineteen nineties, created by Suroosh Alvi, Shane Smith, and Gavin McInnes, and it wore a bratty voice that treated taboos as scouting maps.[2] The magazine moved to New York in the next decade and tapped into an online wave with attitude and nerve, translating the zine ethos into a digital style that prized proximity, risk, and seduction.[2]
As the brand grew, it chased breadth and spectacle, and famous names began to swirl around the project, including Spike Jonze, who took on creative leadership roles as the outfit pushed hard into video and television.[3] The push culminated in a sweeping HBO deal that multiplied the company’s output and ambition, giving Vice daily news, more specials, and a long runway to build out its vision on a premium stage.[4] The moment felt like a coronation and a dare, a sign that the punk kid had been invited into the palace and handed a key to the vault.[5]
Those decisions made Vice far more visible, but they also made it accountable to partners and advertisers and audience promises that did not care about myth.[4] Growth turned the company into a global operation with offices around the world, a web of divisions, and a valuation that climbed to heights that would become hard to defend once the digital ad market cooled and quick pivot strategies lost steam.[2]
Some of what went wrong is documented on the record, and none of it feels especially cinematic if you only chase the thrill rides.[6] There were allegations and settlements involving sexual harassment and defamation inside the company, and a broader account of a workplace that too often felt hostile to women even as the brand sold transgression as a kind of freedom.[7] Senior leaders acknowledged the failures and promised reforms, an admission that the house culture was not only unsustainable but unsafe.[8] The picture that emerged from investigations and public statements looked like a place where swagger and scale had outpaced systems and ethics, where the behavior celebrated in the content bled into office life.[7]
There was also a business problem that everyone in media has now memorized from hard experience.[9] Digital scale turned out to be a mirage for many publishers, online metrics inflated expectations, social platforms shifted rules on a whim, and the core math of advertising revenue could not carry the imperial vision that Vice had pitched to investors and to itself.[6] When the bills came due, the company landed in bankruptcy court with hundreds of millions in debt and a fire sale that handed ownership to lenders at a fraction of those peak valuations.[9] A creditor group that included Fortress and Soros financed operations, took control, and kept parts of the company running, but the dream of a triumphant exit had vanished.[10] In the end the acquisition price approved in court was a small slice of what Vice had once claimed it was worth, a stark adjustment from myth to balance sheet.[11]
Huang touches pieces of that story, but he prefers to keep the narrative tethered to rooms and faces he knows, to the grief of a believer who felt betrayed by a place that helped make him.[1] He revisits the highs and the swagger, and he points to an argument that feels true and incomplete at the same time, the idea that when a niche brand gets big enough to need to please everyone it stops being itself and starts dying.[1] The friction between being a provocateur and being a corporation is real, and the HBO era is an easy symbol of that contradiction.[4] What the film does not do is map that feeling against the specific mechanics that sank the business and stained the culture, the sort of connecting tissue that would tell you why the crash happened beyond the vibe of inevitability.[1]
This is where the choice to foreground the host becomes a problem rather than a device.[1] The movie models the Vice personality cult in miniature, holding on the star when the story is somewhere else in the frame.[1] A running bit in which Huang entertains being an Asian Guy Fieri for an interview plays as both satire and misfire, charming in the moment and distracting in the aggregate.[1] The sequence works as commentary on how the media machine rewards caricature, yet it also reenacts the very dynamic the film claims to interrogate, pulling attention from the subject to the performance.[1]
The conversation with Gavin McInnes lands with similar crosscurrents.[1] McInnes left the company years ago and later founded the Proud Boys, and he long ago mastered the art of provocation as content.[12] In the film he throws out lines designed to bait outrage and dominate the frame, a style of argument that wins by forcing reaction rather than conceding ground.[1] Huang calls out white supremacy, but the interview never really pins McInnes to the wall, and the exchange drifts toward spectacle, even arm wrestling, which may play as a gesture of dominance but reads as surrender to the show.[1] There is a documentary to be made about the pipeline from prankish transgression to organized reactionary politics and about how attention economies reward whoever can hold the camera longest, but that is not this film.[1]
It is impossible to tell the story of this company without looking hard at the workplace revelations that became public in twenty seventeen and the changes they forced.[7] The New York Times reported multiple settlements and dozens of accounts from women who described misconduct, exploitation, and retaliation, and the reporting led to firings and an apology from leadership that conceded the culture had failed.[7] A public statement from the company that month committed to reforms in reporting and training and to pay equity, a formal attempt to turn the page that also codified how much damage had been done.[8] Those events are not side notes in the rise and fall narrative, they are central, because they compromised staff trust, brand identity, and investor confidence all at once.[7]
Then there is the steel cold ledger that hammered most digital publishers in the late twenty teens and early twenties.[9] The company once raised enormous sums and promised that its youthful audience and chameleonic voice could be turned into a stable money engine, only to find that the online ad pie was shrinking, that platforms were powerful and fickle, and that brand deals could not backstop everything forever.[9] When Vice filed for bankruptcy in twenty twenty three, the court documents showed liabilities that dwarfed the price the lenders would pay to take control, a portrait of a business that had been running with mismatched expectations and reality.[9] Even after the sale to the lender group was approved and finalized, there was no illusion that the firm was what it had been at its peak.[11] The brand continued to put out work, and pieces of the enterprise marched on, but the age of the swaggering colossus was over.[10]
Huang is not obligated to provide a forensic audit, of course, and no single film can own the entire chronology of a company that went from a free magazine to a giant that worked with Disney, Fox, and HBO.[5] Still, the choice to dwell on unpaid residuals and riffs and personal wounds makes the film feel small where it needed to be rigorous.[1] The best scene in which the movie looks outward borrows a clip from Page One that captures the late David Carr dressing down Shane Smith, a reminder that media elders had warned for years that attitude without context is not reporting.[1] The clip slices, then it is gone, and the film returns to the familiar comfort of traveling through the story as one man’s diary.[1]
There is an irony here that is hard to shake.[1] Vice taught an entire generation of online storytellers how to make journalism feel like a night out, how to sell risk and irreverence, how to turn the correspondent into a character with a pulse and a past.[2] That influence is everywhere now and you can hear it in podcasts and see it in viral video grammar and in the way newsrooms tell you that the reporter cried or could not sleep or changed their mind.[13] It was liberating when it punctured pompous voices, and it was corrosive when it made first person swagger the default mode rather than a tool used sparingly.[2] The film reflects that inheritance to a fault and becomes a document of the style’s ceiling as much as a chronicle of its era.[1]
What might a more definitive postmortem choose to foreground.[6] It would probably start with the contradiction between audience trust and advertiser cash, the permanent tension in a media company that insists it will speak truth to power while selling sponsorships that need access and good vibes.[6] It would map the timeline of management decisions against shifts in the platform economy and the ad market, tracking when the metrics stopped lining up with the promises.[9] It would grapple with the culture that leadership tolerated and the costs that culture inflicted on women across the organization and why apologies are not absolution when the system stays the same.[7] It would trace how the company courted and amplified professional provocateurs, then watched as some of those energies metastasized into political movements that flourished far away from journalism.[12] And it would hold close the paradox that made Vice matter, that genuine curiosity and courage sometimes lived alongside reckless performance and a hunger for attention that would eat anything.[6]
If you came to Huang’s film hoping for that level of connective tissue, you will mostly find shards of it, scattered across lively conversations and personal memory.[1] You will also find a clear sense of loss about a place that made a lot of people feel alive and seen, even as it hurt people and failed them.[1] That ache is real and worth noting, and the movie is an elegy on those terms, angry and fond and unable to let go.[6] The problem for a viewer looking for answers is that elegy does not explain the mechanics of collapse, it only sings to the ruins.[1]
Back in the early boost years, when HBO expanded its slate with Vice programming and Spike Jonze roamed the Brooklyn office checking cuts, the company presented itself as the future.[4] It would make old media feel flat and out of breath, and for a while it did exactly that.[3] The show on HBO won awards and pushed into conflict zones and stitched together youth culture and geopolitics with swagger and verve.[4] That run is part of the story and should be preserved without cynicism, because a lot of the journalism stands up and a lot of the voices brought into the frame were not in legacy newsrooms at the time.[14] But a company is not a mood, and when the tide turned the brand was left with costly deals and an exhaustion that no persona could hide.[9]
By the time bankruptcy hit, the number that mattered most was not view counts or how often a host trended but the gap between what the firm owed and what anyone was willing to pay for it.[9] Lenders stepped in and kept the lights on, and the assets moved under new control, a mechanical end that carried none of the heat of the early days and all of the clarity.[11] At the start the magic trick was to make transgression look like a business model, but in the end it was the business model that judged the performance and handed down a verdict.[9]
Maybe that is the hardest thing for a participant to narrate on camera.[1] It is easier to remember the people and the nights and the feeling of being at the center of something than to draw a line from a budget meeting to a layoff or from an investor deck to a pivot that stranded a desk.[1] It is also human to want to rescue meaning from a crash by insisting that the project was doomed the moment it got too big, that Vice could only exist at a scale where nobody had to compromise.[1] That claim has bite, but it lets decision makers and systems off the hook in ways that history never should.[6]
Huang’s film is not the last word on any of this, and it does not pretend to be a legal brief or a ledger.[1] On its own terms it is a reckoning with a home that turned into a stranger and with a persona that outgrew its host.[1] If you care about media you will want more than that, and you will have to go to other records to get it, from the investigations that cataloged harm to the filings that lay out the numbers.[7] The materials exist and they tell a bracing story about how a company can conquer a decade and still fail to survive the next one.[9]
There is still a question that lingers after the credits and after the arguments, and it deserves a better answer than nostalgia or outrage.[1] What should we try to keep from the Vice experiment, and what should we put down for good.[6] The appetite for proximity to the world and for stories told with nerve is worth guarding, provided it is built on respect and facts and care for the people who make the work and the people who live inside the stories.[7] The habit of turning every reporter into a brand and every assignment into a stunt is not.[1] If the goal is to show what is true, then the performance needs to serve the reporting and not the other way around.[1] That lesson is not new, but it remains the one most often forgotten when the lights come up and the music hits and the camera starts rolling.[1]
Sources
[1] Vice is Broke movie review & film summary (2025) | Roger Ebert https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/vice-is-broke-documentary-movie-review-2025
[2] Vice Media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_Media
[3] Spike Jonze, Cinema’s Big Kid, Gets a New Playground https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/arts/television/spike-jonze-cinemas-big-kid-gets-a-new-playground.html
[4] HBO, Vice announce expansive news content deal https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-hbo-vice-content-deal-20150326-story.html
[5] Vice and HBO announce content partnership – CNBC https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/26/vice-and-hbo-announce-content-partnership.html
[6] ‘Vice Is Broke’ Review: The Rise and Crash of a Fleeting Empire https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/movies/vice-is-broke-review.html
[7] At Vice, Cutting-Edge Media and Allegations of Old-School … https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/business/media/vice-sexual-harassment.html
[8] Vice Media Statement on Harassment Allegations and … https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/business/vice-media-statement-on-harassment-allegations-and-its-workplace-culture.html
[9] Vice Media Files for Bankruptcy – The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/15/business/media/vice-bankruptcy.html
[10] Vice Media, once worth $5.7 billion, files for bankruptcy – NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/05/15/1173260377/vice-media-bankruptcy
[11] Vice Media to be acquired by Fortress-led lender group for $350 … https://www.reuters.com/markets/deals/vice-medias-sale-fortress-investment-led-group-gets-court-approval-2023-06-23/
[12] From Vice to the Proud Boys: How Canadian Gavin … https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/from-vice-to-the-proud-boys-how-canadian-gavin-mcinnes-birthed-two-polarizing-legacies-1.7362126
[13] Vice Media stops publishing on website and cuts hundreds … https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68377742
[14] Vice (TV series) – Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vice_(TV_series)
