Rev (2020)

(On Cable TV, January 2021) The sole distinction earned by Rev is being a GTA-set GTA. Or, to unpack this a bit, of being a Grand Theft Auto game set in the Greater Toronto Area. Unfortunately, Rev also has to contend with being an amoral low-budget film, both of which severely limit its effectiveness. Stuck without an action sequence budget, Rev muddles through a story that doesn’t include a single expansive action scene: don’t expect car chases or shootouts, because this is a film that exemplifies “look, but do not touch the expensive rented cars that we can’t afford to trash.”  The other problem is a lack of morals—Scorsese-style, the film is heavily narrated by its protagonist, a young man turning to crime because a steady job is too boring and he doesn’t have the basic skills required for customer service or managing his boss. His sole claim to being a hero has to do with being forced to work with the police, but he (in the tradition of such films—I don’t writer-director Ant Horasanli has a single original idea for Rev beside setting it in Toronto) eventually reneges on that. There’s a useful comparison here to be made with the Fast and Furious series that Rev is so intent on imitating—the Fast and Furious characters may not be law-abiding, but they have strong personal morals and likable traits that are completely absent here. Our protagonist loves making money, stealing his boss’s girlfriend (which goes over more smoothly than you’d expect in the end) and not working for The Man—making him of dubious likability if you’re not a part of the same sociopathic set. Low budget action plus rock-bottom morals make Rev easy to dismiss as nothing more than a wannabe close of much better films. It didn’t have to be like that—from a visual perspective, Rev stretches its budget as far as it can go with some really good cinematography, adequate acting (I won’t argue with Vivica A. Fox and Hannah Gordon) and dialogue that, from time to time, can be amusing. But it’s all in the service of something intensely predictable and completely meaningless, trivializing crime with a fairytale distinction between bad criminals and “good” criminals engaged in the proverbial “cool crime of car thievery.”  Rev is the kind of film that went wrong at the scripting stage, chasing an audience without understanding that it’s got to be about more than making money and running off on the beach.