PLOT: John Miller (Alan Ritchson), a blue-collar autoworker living in 1977 Detroit, is framed as a drug dealer by a local gangster (Ben Foster) with designs on his girlfriend (Shailene Woodley), sparking a violent battle on the streets of the titular Motor City.
REVIEW: I can’t blame you for thinking, based on the description above, that Motor City sounds awfully familiar. We’ve all seen revenge movies about wrongly accused badasses, but the execution is what makes this truly unique, with it having been invited to both TIFF and the lofty Venice International Film Festival.
You see — Motor City has no dialogue. (Well, okay, it has about five short sentences and a lot of grunting during the fights.) The art of the movie is that director Potsy Ponciroli and writer Chad St. John have done away with any and all exposition, totally relying on the movie’s imagery (and impressive soundscape) to do the heavy lifting. John Woo tried something similar with Silent Night, but Motor City’s execution is better, without relying on an easy gimmick where the lead is mute. Everyone in Motor City can talk. They just choose not to — or rather, when they do, we don’t hear them.
While some may cringe at how pretentious that sounds, Motor City is anything but. It’s actually a rollicking action flick, serving as a great launching pad for Reacher’s Alan Ritchson, with this being the first of a slate of action movies he has coming out over the next few months. While you never hear him talk, you get everything you need to know about Miller throughout, including his history as a Vietnam vet turned ex-con, his romance with Woodley’s character, and his rivalry with Foster’s drug-addled, demented gangster.
Ritchson has a marvellously expressive face, and that becomes a huge advantage for a movie like this, along with his intensity and imposing build. The action sequences are all hard-hitting and ultra-violent, with this proudly R-rated. Ponciroli has a whale of a time staging carnage to an impressive selection of needle drops supervised by none other than Jack White, from the early (slightly anachronistic) use of David Bowie’s Cat People (the more rockin’ album mix) to Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain and so on. The score by Steve Jablonsky is likewise strong — his best work in years.
The action is ferocious, with an especially good mano-a-mano fight between Ritchson and co-star Pablo Schreiber (who plays a crooked cop) serving as the action highlight. The cast is strong, with Woodley bringing humanity to a role that could have easily been a simple femme fatale part. Nor is she too innocent, for that matter, quickly taking up with Foster the minute her man gets put away. Foster has a great time as a slick, weasel-like 1970s scumbag, looking like he raided the Bee Gees’ tour bus for some of his wardrobe. I also dug The Bear’s Lionel Boyce and Willow’s Amar Chadha-Patel as Miller’s ride-or-die Nam buddies, who help him inflict maximum carnage in the movie’s gore-soaked finale.
While the idea of a dialogue-free action movie might not be everyone’s cup of tea, I found myself riveted by the craft demonstrated by Ponciroli. Given Ritchson’s rising fame, this could be a movie people talk about for years.
