Give me a brooding mid-1970s Detroit nightscape stained with grubby neon, drop a body with a severed leg off a building and crank up a David Bowie song and you have my attention. But director Potsy Ponciroli’s vicious revenge saga, Motor City, while impressively sustained on many levels and even fun in a mindless exploitation way, can’t get around a gimmicky script by Chad St. John populated with pulp-crime stereotypes in boilerplate situations.
A glowering Alan Ritchson brings gravitas by virtue of his hulking physical presence alone, but Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster and Pablo Schreiber are stuck playing characters too familiar to pack much heat.
Motor City
The Bottom Line
Bracing for a while, then just flashy and thin.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Spotlight)
Cast: Alan Ritchson, Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster, Pablo Schreiber, Lionel Boyce, Amar Chadha-Patel, Ben McKenzie
Director: Potsy Ponciroli
Screenwriter: Chad St. John
1 hour 43 minutes
The audacious stunt behind the project is to build an adrenaline-charged crime thriller almost entirely without dialogue. It requires skill to sustain such a conceit and Ponciroli largely pulls it off, but a stunt is exactly what it ends up being. For a while the fabulous ‘70s needle drops — Fleetwood Mac, Bill Withers, Donna Summer, the Moody Blues — keep it punchy and there’s certainly some well-staged action, notably toward the end. But you can only get so far with one-dimensional characters.
Thankfully, Ritchson, still very much in the built-like-a-brick-shithouse punisher mode of Reacher, doesn’t require a lot of nuance as John Miller, a blue-collar guy who gets caught in the web of scuzzy underworld drug kingpin Reynolds (Foster). That’s Miller disposing of a body in the kinetic opening before hitting the streets, blasting the head off one bad dude, getting thrown from the hood of another guy’s muscle car — in slow-mo, Ponciroli’s favorite device — and shooting at the driver as a freeze-frame leaves him hanging.
The timeline then jumps around, winding back first to Miller proposing to his diner waitress girlfriend Sophia (Woodley), just in time for cops to lob a teargas cannister through the window and burst in. They arrest him for the major cocaine haul found in his car trunk, which, unbeknownst to Sophia, was planted there. No prizes for guessing which of the detectives on the scene is corrupt — clean-cut Kent (Ben McKenzie) in his respectable gray suit, or Savick (Pablo Schreiber) in his black leather regulation pimp-daddy trench coat.
Tossed into prison on false charges, Miller’s memories return to the night he met Sophia. He is smoking a cigarette in the alley behind a club when she comes slinking over to get a light, poured into a barely-there gold metallic mesh minidress. She soon locks him in a kiss, which Reynolds isn’t too happy about when he steps out of the club, the ensuing altercation sealing the hostility between the two men.
Back in the movie’s present, Reynolds has no qualms about revealing he was behind the frame-up, dropping in on Miller in the police interrogation room just to toss the engagement ring the arrested man gave to Sophia and leave without a word. Reynolds goads Miller by sending a photo of himself getting cozy with Sophia, and in a moment both lurid and laughable, the prisoner visualizes the two of them getting naked and going at it right outside the cell.
Cue jailbreak and operation vendetta. Miller shows craft aptitude that would make Martha Stewart proud, fashioning himself a shiv out of a mold he carves in a bar of soap. He also has help from two associates on the outside, the savvy Youngblood (Lionel Boyce from The Bear) and the deadly Singh (Amar Chadha-Patel), the latter’s part of the ingenious getaway plan setting up the requisite shot of badasses sauntering away from a wall of fire.
The mayhem that follows builds via creditable fight choreography and operatic violence to Miller’s inevitable faceoff with Reynolds. But first, he and his crew must get past Savick, resulting in a visceral clash on a stairwell between the crooked cop and Singh, followed by an even bloodier mano-a-mano with blades while Miller and Savick share the tight confines of an elevator.
Those pulse-pounding action set-pieces have so much bone-crunching power that the showdown with Reynolds feels anticlimactic — especially because for no good reason it involves a forward time jump and some unconvincing old-guy makeup.
The energy also takes a dip when Ponciroli quits with the evocative ‘70s song selections — or runs out of music-rights cash — and leans more exclusively on composer Steve Jablonsky’s moody but generic synth score. While he’s credited only for a cameo role and as one of about 300 executive producers, Jack White reportedly had a hand in overseeing the use of music, and his barnburner song “Archbishop Harold Holmes” provides a rousing end-credits outro.
While so many brawny, testosterone-fueled action thrillers fall prey to risible dialogue — which only someone like a winking Jason Statham is able to get away with — Motor City is rendered a bit silly by its silence. (At least, verbal silence; there’s plenty of other noise to keep the wheels turning.)
Woodley’s character remains ambiguous for too long, especially when she’s flouncing around like a femme fatale in sunglasses, big hair and furs the size of Alan Ritchson. By the time we’re clued into where Sophia’s loyalty really lies, it becomes hard to care about her outcome. Given an even sketchier character outline, Foster — who takes the gold in a movie that’s the Olympics of bad wigs — just sails over the top, taking his cue from a wardrobe of regrettable ‘70s fashions, with chunky gold chains nestled in a thick carpet of chest hair.
Schreiber does marginally better because his role is mostly physical, but McKenzie gets too little screen time to register. Could somebody please find a way to use this terrific actor in movies?
It’s Ritchson (also a producer) who keeps the thriller reasonably taut with his wall-of-muscle presence and simmering mix of heartache and rage. He’s helped by John Matysiak’s propulsive cinematography and production design by Mayne Berke that nails the desired vibe of a dying industrial city experiencing a spread of drug deals and other crime. (Punk fans will get a kick out of seeing the Ramones on the Fox Theatre marquee, not that they ever played there.)
Ponciroli managed to freshen up classic Western archetypes in 2021’s Old Henry, but his latest attempt at genre reinvention gets hobbled by a weak script and a stylistic gimmick that runs its course just as the movie should be revving up. While it’s not without entertainment value, Motor City feels like it wants to be Don Siegel meets Michael Mann meets Walter Hill with a dash of John Woo, but ends up an ersatz version of all their work.
