‘Motor City’ Review: Alan Ritchson Kills His Way Through a Dialogue-Free Crime Pastiche with Nothing to Say and Little to Look at

The "Reacher" star plays an ex-con with a score to settle in a gimmicky action movie from the director of "Old Henry."

A much easier movie to root for than it is to enjoy, Potsy Ponciroli’s striking but silly “Motor City” strips grindhouse revenge thrillers down to their studs with a dialogue-free wad of pulp fiction in which big muscles, broad tropes, and a badly implemented soundtrack of overused bangers do all of the talking. 

Panciroli is a well-meaning throwback artist whose debut feature — the 2021 Tim Blake Nelson western “Old Henry” — was inexplicably atop the Netflix charts last week. Though he takes obvious pleasure in distilling another genre to its most basic essence, the purity of his intentions is muddled by the unrefined clumsiness of his filmmaking. By a setting so blandly digital that a movie called “Motor City” needs a “1977 Detroit” title card to let us know where it takes place. By “American Hustle”-worthy costumes that make the “1977” part comedically redundant. By a plot so broad it feels like you’re watching a shadow play with the lights on, and setpieces that too often strain to compensate for the movie’s gimmick instead of exploiting it. 

The whole non-verbal action thing demands a visual stylist at the height of their powers; to judge by John Woo’s significantly worse “Silent Night,” even a past-their-prime genius might be defeated by the challenge. Potsy Ponciroli is no John Woo. It seems like he’s aspiring to be Robert Rodriguez. I hope to one day see a movie that feels like he was happy to direct it as himself. The good news is that “Reacher” star Alan Ritchson doesn’t need words — or a particularly ingenious auteur — to play a compelling ex-con with a score to settle. He just needs to be enormous (always) and sweaty (sometimes), and he’s excellent at doing both of those things here. 

Ritchson plays John Miller, a hulking former criminal as generic as his name would suggest. We first meet John as he’s throwing a bad guy off a building rooftop and blasting another, less dead bad guy full of improvised buckshot in slow-motion (a technique that Ponciroli repeatedly deploys in order to infuse simple action beats with a sense of operatic gravitas). What might inspire someone who just graduated from probation to go on such an unfettered killing spree? What indeed. 

The rest of the movie rewinds a few weeks from there to find John at the top of his game. He’s got a good job down at the factory, a beautiful girlfriend at home (Shailene Woodley, doing heroically thankless work as moll-turned-diner-waitress Sophia), and a fantastic wig of flowing blond hair at all times. But then, as he’s down on one knee to propose to Sophia, the fuzz hurls a gas canister through their living room window and hauls John back to the clink. 

It seems that our man has run afoul of Sophia’s old squeeze, the meanest gangster west of Cleveland (Ben Foster as Reynolds, all chest hair and cheap polyester), and he’s used his connection with the dirtiest cop in Detroit (Pablo Schreiber) to frame John for some drug stuff. It isn’t long before the crime lord has reclaimed Sophia for himself, moved her into his cocaine castle in the suburbs, and pumped her full of too many narcotics to remember what Reynolds took from her. Or maybe she likes being a kept woman who gets to swan around the city decked out like a disco ball. It’s hard to say in a movie where no one speaks, and Chad St. John’s long-gestating script offers little opportunity to read between the lines. All we know for sure is that Reynolds would be in some XXXL trouble if John found a way to bust out of prison. Maybe, and I’m just spitballing here, in a wonderfully orchestrated sequence that illustrates what “Motor City” might have been had the film surrendered to the muscular pleasures of kinetic movement instead of trying to squeeze an overwrought revenge saga out of its increasingly distracting silence? Hypothetically, that would be very bad for the people who crossed him.

As it stands, however, Ponciroli lacks the vision and/or budget required to stage the ballet of bullets of brawn demanded by its conceit. The symphony of sound effects that he conducts as a consolation — the flick of a lighter, the clank of handcuffs around Ritchson’s wrists, the slurp of Foster’s tongue licking Woodley’s nipples in a daydream sequence meant to represent James’ worst nightmare — succeeds at little beyond calling attention to itself. The prison break is one of three setpieces that find a satisfying harmony between form and function (the other two, a knife fight in an elevator and a shootout amid a rain of factory sparks, bleed into each other during the film’s dying minutes), but I spent most of “Motor City” wondering why anyone bothered with the dialogue-free gimmick if so much of the movie was still going to unfold as a conventional thriller. 

Rather than deconstruct the genre by distilling it to its core, and/or by exaggerating its dramatic shorthand in order to reveal the inescapable gravity of its underlying pathos, “Motor City” treats its conceit like a problem to be solved as simply as possible. Windows become a go-to replacement for words, as Ponciroli shoots a number of scenes — James’ meeting with his parole officer, and then his interrogation at the police station — from the other side of a glass wall as a hyper-instructive Bill Withers or Fleetwood Mac song blares over the soundtrack. The effect doesn’t refine this simple tale into the stuff of absolute cinema so much as flatten it into a one-dimensional thriller where everything takes twice as long as it should with half the usual detail. 

While it’s true these characters wouldn’t have much to say even if they were free to speak their minds (as the film’s hilariously misjudged coda makes all too clear), Ponciroli is right to acknowledge that action movies have a magical way of transmuting wanton bloodshed into a poetry of its own. In other words, it’s seldom a good thing when you’re watching one that makes you think “I wish everyone would just fucking talk to each other.” It’s even worse when you know that they won’t.

Grade: C

“Motor City” is now playing in theaters.