Synopsis: In 1970s Detroit, John Miller falls for a local gangster’s girl and lands in prison for a crime he didn’t commit. With his life ruined, Miller plots revenge against the man who took his girl away.
Stars: Alan Ritchson, Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster, Amar Chadha-Patel, Ben McKenzie, Lionel Boyce, Pablo Schreiber
Director: Potsy Ponciroli
Rated: R
Running Length: 103 minutes
Movie Review in Brief: There’s a killer soundtrack, a career-best elevator brawl, and almost nobody talking. Motor City looks like it was born on a 1977 drive-in screen and forgot that even those pictures let somebody speak.
Motor City Review: Running on Fumes
The 1970s drive-in circuit ran on grudges. A man gets wronged, a woman gets used, somebody pays for it across ninety minutes of squealing tires and questionable wigs, and nobody in the parking lot ever asked for more than that. Those pictures didn’t need a premise, they needed fuel. Motor City pulls up with a full tank and the right playlist, and for a good long while you’re glad to be in the passenger seat. Then it starts running on fumes around the halfway mark, and rather than pull over, it keeps its foot down and coasts the rest of the way on attitude.
Five Lines of Dialogue
In 1977 Detroit, factory worker John Miller (Alan Ritchson, Ordinary Angels) is hopelessly gone on Sophia (Shailene Woodley, The Fault in Our Stars), who’s trying to get out from under her boyfriend Reynolds (Ben Foster, Christy), a gang boss who hurts her. Miller is the gentle giant offering the thing Reynolds never will: kindness, regular hours, a life that doesn’t involve late nights, drugs, and men with guns in the kitchen. Reynolds is not built to lose gracefully. Drugs turn up in Miller’s car, a long sentence comes down, and Miller goes into prison with a head full of rage and comes out with exactly one name on his list.
Director Potsy Ponciroli, and that’s either a great director name or the perfect thing to pop out of a gangster name generator, made the terrific Old Henry, which premiered at Venice in 2021. Here he stages nearly everything without dialogue; Foster has said the finished film contains five spoken lines. Silence is a choice, though, and a movie has to be built to carry it. John Woo’s Silent Night (2023) earned the same trick honestly by putting a bullet through its hero’s throat in the first act, which meant the man physically could not speak. Nobody in Motor City has that excuse, so you spend a lot of the runtime wondering why these people won’t just open their mouths.
Ponciroli finds some smart workarounds: closed car windows, long lenses that swallow a conversation whole, a room watched from across the street. Too often, though, actors nobody has ever accused of restraint are left making enormous shapes with their eyes and eyebrows when one line would settle the whole thing. Watching capable actors mime what a single line of dialogue would fix becomes its own strange kind of suspense.
Fifteen Years in the Waiting Room
There’s a better story in how this got made than in anything the movie tells you. Chad St. John’s screenplay landed on the 2009 Black List, the annual survey where several hundred development executives anonymously name their favorite screenplays that nobody has managed to produce yet. It’s a genuine calling card, and it’s also a waiting room. St. John’s script then spent fifteen years at Warner Bros. with Chris Evans, Dominic Cooper, Jake Gyllenhaal, Gerard Butler, and Adrien Brody each circling the lead at one point or another, and not one of those versions made it to a camera.
That’s how development actually stalls out, by the way. A script everybody admires gets a star attached, then the star’s schedule slides, or the budget won’t close, or the executive championing it takes a job somewhere else, and the whole package goes back on the shelf to wait for the next admirer. Ponciroli’s is the version that finally got out, and you can feel fifteen years of hands on it. The shooting script ran 86 pages, which Ponciroli has called full and descriptive, and I believe him, because you can feel exactly where the words came out. Foster is playing a man who clearly loves the sound of his own voice, and the movie keeps clamping a hand over his mouth.
Thank God for the Cast
Ritchson broods with real weight, though there’s no getting around the sight of him: those XXXL arms stuffed into an XL white tee read pure modern gym selfie, and the shaggy wig sitting on top turns him into a de-greened Incredible Hulk. Woodley gets one gorgeous look after another courtesy of costume designer Amy Roth, who took her cues from Farrah Fawcett and magazine spreads of the period. Woodley wears 1977 disco chic so well that Jennifer Lawrence in American Hustle starts to look underdressed.
Pablo Schreiber turns up in a Travolta wig and a pornstache you could hang a coat on, and he compensates for the silence by making every single gesture forceful. It’s distracting and it’s also doing a job. Ben McKenzie plays the honest cop working corruption inside his own department, and after years of mixing him up with Foster, I finally got the two of them sorted. The movie put them both in front of me and made me pick which was which.
The Craft Does the Talking
Everything here that flat-out works sits on the technical side. Cinematographer John Matysiak, back with Ponciroli after Old Henry, makes New Jersey pulse like Detroit, pulling from Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and stacks of period photo books. Steve Jablonsky’s score moves between confident, cocky, and untethered, sometimes inside the same cue. The song choices are immaculate: Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)” opens the picture and Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain” scores an arrest. Jack White served as music director and executive producer, and he shows up onscreen at a piano, which is exactly the kind of flex this movie should be making more often.
Then there’s the action, which needs no dialogue and knows it. Ritchson and Schreiber have one of the great elevator brawls, beautifully brutal from the first punch. The crew built two matching elevator cars and shot them side by side across one twelve-hour day, and the reason is practical rather than showy: a fight that wrecks the space it’s in needs a clean twin standing by, because once the blood starts going everywhere you want a fresh car waiting instead of a mop, a hose, and three lost hours. Jamie Kelman’s makeup and prosthetics work in the back half hits harder than anything the silent gimmick manages all movie.
Where This Revenge Picture Ends Up
The drive-in aesthetic Motor City is chasing is a noble target, and those pictures were never carrying deep premises either. The difference is that they moved. There’s a terrific forty-minute movie in here, and the other hour is a mixtape with a body count. Slow motion, music interludes, and forced pantomime stretch a short film into a feature, and nobody digs hard enough to make the back half earn its running time. Ritchson has been good before, and this clarifies how much of that depended on having something to say out loud. He needs dialogue. So does the movie.
Motor City looks like it was born on a drive-in screen in 1977. It just forgot that even those pictures let somebody talk.
Looking for something? Search for it here! Try an actor, movie, director, genre, or keyword!
