Uberviolent Alan Ritchson action vehicle Motor City (now on AMC+) opens with a very Quentin Tarantinoesque font on the title card, then proceeds to be very UN-Tarantinoesque as it plays out with almost no dialogue. What Motor City director Potsy Ponciroli aims for is the classic Tarantino regurgitated pulp, funneled through the working-class dinge of 1970s Detroit and a thematically curated selection of era-specific songs on the soundtrack. And the result is an entertaining, somewhat experimental riff on revenge-story tropes.
MOTOR CITY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: This is a revenge story within a revenge story, as one man seeks revenge on another man for stealing his girl, then the second man seeks revenge on the first man after he steals her back. The girl doesn’t seem to have much agency here, but that’s kinda the way movies in the ’70s worked, and this movie wants to be one of those movies, so it’s up to you if you want to accept that excuse. Anyway. You’ve already notched that there’s almost no dialogue here, which means character names are a challenge to glean. The credits reveal them but I’d already dubbed them like so: the Put-Upon Man (Ritchson of Reacher fame), the Girl (Shailene Woodley), the Sleazemeister General (Ben Foster), the Good Cop (Ben McKenzie), and the Bad Cop (Pablo Schreiber). Stereotypes of the genre, for sure.
The other character is a narrator who doesn’t speak, but feeds dimes into the jukebox, shaping the story with Bowie, Fleetwood Mac, the Moody Blues and real cool shit like Bill Withers and Foxy. Drop into the lyrics and you may find some nuance to the story, which otherwise plays out in broad strokes in 1970s Detroit as the Put-Upon Man is framed by the Bad Cop, who’s on the Sleazemeister General’s payroll. Why frame the guy? The Put-Upon Man ended up with the Girl, who used to be the Sleazemeister General’s abusee. Meanwhile, the Good Cop noses around, suspicious of the Bad Cop’s actions. And everything is authentically cigarettes. Everything! CIGARETTES!
The fact that the Put-Upon Man is built like the proverbial shick brithouse doesn’t scare the Sleazemeister General, who’s a rich-as-hell Dee-troit drug lord. But the Sleazemeister doesn’t realize his new enemy is a former Army Ranger — it’s always OPS guys in these movies, black OPS, special OPS, classified OPS, all the OPS OPS OPS — who apparently learned how to endure enormous amounts of pain and shrug off the psychological trauma inherent in murdering people. Car chases, gunfights, fistfights, knife fights, prison breaks, etc., ensue as the righteous face off against the wicked, as the movie gods intended.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? This is Martin Scorsese’s Rambo funneled through some modern Wick-core aesthetics.
Performance Worth Watching: Well, nobody can eat scenery without dialogue. So the movie inherently sides with Ritchson’s strong, silent type while making Foster’s wordless emoting — even his sweat seems to be sweating — look extra pathetic. The latter is fun to watch.
Sex And Skin: Topless Woodley.
Our Take: Motor City’s emphasis on style over all else means it isn’t the most emotionally engaging story. But it is enjoyable, less experimental than it is a dalliance, Ponciroli toying with form for his and our entertainment, less so as artistic exploration. The amalgamation of needle drops and pantomime is fun and clever, although all creatives involved clearly understand that, even in movies with dialogue, violence is always the loudest language that’s “spoken.” Action speaks louder, and all that.
Enjoyable as it can be, the film clearly hopes our brains brown out as soon as Ritchson tosses a body off a building on top of a massive Big Three sedan in the opening sequence. It breezes right through glaring plot holes, and the Put-Upon Man’s autoworker gig – he wears an actual blue collar at one point – is about as truly, deeply Detroit as the movie ever gets (it was reportedly filmed in New Jersey and Saudi Arabia). The obviously fake streets outside the Fox Theatre are filled with generic scum from the Taxi Driver garage sale, and the soundtrack, so central to the narrative, outright ignores the Stooges, Motown and Alice Cooper. A Jack White cameo only goes so far; one fetishy ogling shot of a ’73 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron would’ve gone over smashingly.
Call it thematic sloppiness or a case of false advertising if you want, but Motor City is otherwise admirable in its attempt to deliver familiarities via a reasonably fresh method. It delivers OTT violence via stylegasm through the gauze of sewer-grate steam and Pall Mall smoke, and eschews dialogue in order to provoke our other senses – we can almost smell Foster’s surely rancid B.O. as the soundtrack thumps, and forces Ponciroli to engage with visual storytelling. At least that stuff is more authentic than the setting.
Our Call: Bottom line? Fun enough. STREAM IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
