Trying Something New With The Familiar
I will always champion ambitious filmmaking in some way, good or bad. Even when things are colossal failures – huge swing and a miss efforts – I will always be on the side of grateful that things like it exists. Motor City is a unique yet familiar crime thriller that tries to iterate on common tropes with uncommon plot conceits. Powered by a dude’s rock soundtrack with a behemoth of a lead action star, the film in practice works only as well as you allow it to on paper. Spiritually, it evokes the direct-to-video B-movie exploitation action of the 70s with a 2000s revenge thriller execution, leaving Motor City to feel like a forgotten gem from a bygone era. There’s a music video quality to it all, and milage will vary on whether that works or not.
Directed by Potsy Ponciroli with a script from Chad St. John, Motor City follows John Miller (Alan Ritchson), an ex-soldier turned blue-collar worker in 1970s Detroit. Times are tough and the criminal underworld reek havoc on the streets. Though Miller tries his best to keep his head down, he falls in love with Sophia (Shailene Woodley) who happens to be the girlfriend of one of the must ruthless crime bosses in the city. Upon discovering their love affair, Reynolds (Ben Foster) frames Miller for a crime he didn’t commit and send him to prison for years. Of course, he returns with only vengeance on his mind, and decides to take the fight to Reynolds, get his life back and save his true love.
Silent But Deadly
Motor City relies on the plot conceit of virtually no dialogue to set itself apart from other similar action movies. There is maybe a total of 5 lines of dialogue in the entire film, with all of the action and narrative forwarding stemming from its use of a killer 70s rock soundtrack and big, operatic blocking. It’s this choice that makes the music video comparisons apt; it’s all style and only a little substance, never going hard enough to truly sell its ideas but going just hard enough to be consistently entertaining. The 70s aesthetic allows it really put its grittiness forward while also letting the melodrama of it all feel right at home instead of goofy. Motor City is a little goofy, with the lack of dialogue forcing everyone to stretch their acting chops to varying degrees of success.
When it’s shooting shotguns and blowing up cars or just generally letting Alan Ritchson go full action tough guy, Motor City rocks. Ponciroli clearly knows how to pay homage to the time in cinema its evoking, and the hyper stylized cinematography is some of the film’s greatest strengths. It’s a pulpy revenge thriller high on vibes and executed much better than John Woo’s abysmal Silent Night. If you let it, Motor City is a whole lot of fun. There’s enough that works in this bold experiment to make a satisfying time watching Ritchson aura farm with his hulking frame, grunting and punching his way through henchmen to get the girl.
The Silence Doesn’t Say Enough
But the choice to remove the dialogue and making it more of a cool looking music video than a fully realized feature film can only carry Motor City so far. At 103 minutes, the style starts to become stale, and the performers start to show the limits of their ability and the necessity of words that help shape and flesh out their characters. Only Foster seems capable, perfectly channeling his hateability and sniveling villainous caricature he does so well so often. Ritchson is fine by default, his gigantic presence often making up for his lack of character development via strictly visual language. He’s the stoic hero whose only motivation is revenge, so there isn’t much need for nuance.
It’s Woodley that struggles the most, breaking the no speaking rule more often than anyone else be it through sound mixing or simply being unable to convey her emotions with silent crying and screaming. Every time Motor City breaks its own gimmick it highlights just how gimmicky it actually is and starts to unravel its smart employment of interesting ideas. I may just be out on Woodley as a whole, and to be fair she isn’t given a whole lot to work with anyway so it’s probably disingenuous to hold her fully accountable for the slip ups. But it is still distracting nonetheless, and Motor City would probably fair better with more dialogue or sadly a different actress.
Not Enough Movie Beneath The Gimmick
These small cracks in the performances reveal something missing from Motor City: beneath that hyper stylized 70s grit and no dialogue narrative, there just isn’t enough happening once it all wears off. It’s all pretty stock and standard once you get past its experimental execution, making you almost wish Ponciroli just went for broke and embraced the cornball melodrama of the tough guy action drama. The gimmick of Motor City neither helps nor hurts the overall entertainment depending on where you land on it, making it hard to outright hate it but harder to outright love it, too. It’s simply too silly to be this self serious, leaving you wishing it just went full 70s thriller throwback, cheesy dialogue and all.
No one in Motor City acts like a real human being, and that’s perfectly fine for the kind of movie it’s trying to be. But it never quite crosses the line to over the top action foolery, holding itself back attempting to appear smart and more original than it actually is. No amount of style can hide the familiarity beneath the surface, and one wishes Ponciroli worked harder to blend the two rather than using one to overshadow the other. If all you have is style, then you’re left with very little once the allure has worn off, and Motor City suffers from this mixed bag of approach.
Final Thoughts
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy Motor City. It really is dudes rock cinema and I’m almost always down for that kind of silly filmmaking. The extended music video of it all only bothered me the longer it goes and more times it breaks its own rules, the underlying narrative not interesting enough to sustain it’s runtime. When it pops, it rips, bursting with inventive style and sexy slow motion explosions that would surely make the Woos and Snyders of the world proud. But Motor City is only as a good as the sum of its parts, and if there are any parts of this 70s Detroit crime thriller than fall short for you, unfortunately the whole thing implodes and lands with a whimper instead of a bang.
If you thought the needle drop discourse was bad now, just wait until Motor City drops and literally uses them as its primary dialogue. Twitter is about to be lit.
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