Final Rating: 4/5
In February 2024, Vice stopped publishing content to its website, following a Chapter 11 bankruptcy declaration the previous fall. This marked the end of an era for the outlet that had popularized a new form of guerrilla journalism in the 21st century. After 29 years and multiple buyouts, Vice was finally broke.
Vice is Broke acts as a postmortem for the media empire started by Shuroosh Alvi, Gavin McInnes and Shane Smith. Through interviews with early Vice journalists, executives, and freelancers, writer-director Eddie Huang examines the company’s history from its beginnings as a zine in Montreal, to its most recent iteration as an Emmy-winning news organization under Smith.
Huang comes to the subject as someone from the inside. From 2016 to 2017, Huang hosted a food and travel show on Vice’s HBO collaboration channel Viceland called Huang’s World. Citing Anthony Bourdain as an influence, Huang begins the documentary with a short personal essay about his relationship with Bourdain. The essay sets the tone for a hard-hitting documentary uninterested in pulling any punches.
In the early days, Vice was essentially an incubator, with McInnes encouraging people to write about what they wanted. Creatively, it’s depicted close to utopian: no limits on what to write about, and plenty of support for putting out the best version of a piece. Early writers are wistful, several pointing to Vice as jump starting their careers. However, with each interview, there’s hesitation when talking about McInnes himself. While everyone is quick to point out that his sense of humour and approach to satire formed the backbone of Vice’s tone in those early days, they also tend to wind the conversation down after saying he was “edgy”.
In the years since his tenure at Vice, McInnes would go on to found the Proud Boys, a domestic terrorist organization active in the US and Canada, most famous for being asked to “stand back and stand by” by former US President Donald Trump in 2020. He’s been a correspondent on multiple podcasts and news shows from Fox News to Blaze Media and beyond, where he’ll regularly make provocative claims that startle even the hosts. In interviews with Huang, former Vice employees are happy to point out that their last contact with him was around the time he left.
Vice is Broke doesn’t intentionally go easy on McInnes, but can’t wholeheartedly condemn him, either. McInnes is interviewed in the movie but doesn’t have a lot to offer. Huang doesn’t push back on McInnes’ hateful rhetoric, theorizing that it’s a tactic to get a rise, and refusing to give in. That said, McInnes masterfully manoeuvres around Huang. If anything, Broke acts as something of a rehabilitation for McInnes’ image: it doesn’t deny his role in political radicalization, but it paints his current personality as little more than an unfortunate progression of a creatively-minded provocateur.
When Huang instead sets his sights on Smith, he stops holding back entirely. Broke frames Smith as a poser, someone with an insatiable need to be cool at any cost. McInnes leaving Vice is at least partially blamed on Smith pushing him out due to jealousy. Vice’s financial troubles are presented in concert with Smith’s gambling habits. At one point, a series of documents from an audit are presented to implicate Smith in not paying royalties to Huang. When footage of Smith is shown, there’s a bias towards the most unflattering clips possible, occasionally with follow-up narration from Huang further blasting his former employer.
Vice is Broke also celebrates work done by the individual writers, editors, and contributors to Vice. Huang breaks down important articles and videos from each era in Vice’s history, interviewing the (often originally uncredited) creatives behind each piece to learn what Vice was like at that time. By looking at the company’s time as a zine, pioneer of online alternative news, and eventual rise as a trendsetter for mainstream news channels, Huang creates a comprehensive portrait of a titan of 21st century nonfiction media. For much of its life, Vice was a place where writers could innovate.
Vice is Broke was seen during the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival.
