Critic Reviews

Smart, ambitious and impressive, Run This Town is the best kind of feature directing debut, a film that entertains and makes you look forward to what will come next.

Superbly entertaining ... An engaging thriller first and a millennial can-do tale second, Tollman’s script sometimes tells rather than shows as it repeats points later in the picture. Yet the rapid-fire pacing is continually riveting, calling back to the great political thrillers of yesteryear.

An involving and ambitious fictionalized look at Rob Ford's downfall that is far from satisfied with gawking at that Toronto trainwreck, Ricky Tollman's Run This Town also intends to make points about racism and sexual harassment; to lament the slow-motion death of journalism; and to give voice to a generation of young adults who've been maligned by the oldsters who, as the movie sees it, made them the way they are.

Tollman’s promise as a writer and director is evident, but not unlike his ambitious and untested protagonist, an editor might be what he needs most, whether or not he knows it.

Thankfully, both Platt and Massoud shine in their respective roles. They take the characters that Tollman wrote and make them layered, complex, and enthralling to the viewer.

Run This Town offers some sharp observations about the struggle to provide anything like watchdog journalism in an age of diminished budgets and readership.

The movie never quite reconciles its assorted perspectives into a coherent point of view.

Throughout the film, Ford’s behavior, which should be in the foreground of this story, seems to curiously fade to the back.

I’m not sure why director Ricky Tollman would take a real story that practically writes itself and write something else. It’s hard to follow what he’s trying to say with Run This Town, but it’s said awkwardly, without much regard to reality. The cast are all engaging and terrifically talented. But the story they’re given is a narrative straitjacket that even the best actors couldn’t save.

Yeah, it’s not good. Writer/director Ricky Tollman has turned the true story of Rob Ford’s crack video into a fake cris du coeur for millennials.