What’s It About

In the 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 hatches a plan for revenge.

MOVIESinMO REVIEW

At what point does a bold idea turn into a cheap trick? That question hit me early in Motor City, the new revenge thriller from director Potsy Ponciroli, a film that dares to tell its whole story with almost no spoken words. In a time when so many movies feel written for people only half watching their screens, a nearly silent film should feel like a jolt of energy. It should make a critic sit up straight. Instead, Motor City never seems to understand the gift it was holding. Right from the beginning, the decision seems more rigid than courageous. Actors move their lips but do not make any sounds. A film that relies on such a technique must have a certain lightheartedness about it, a touch of humor which makes a silent film entertaining. John Woo attempted a similar approach in his work Silent Night with success because this movie was not overly serious. Motor City goes the other way. The filmmakers regard their silence as a jewel and use slomo in practically all the scenes, so even the simplest moments seem unbearably long. The scenario is accompanied by a long introduction that makes viewers lose interest much before they get to the ending. The story itself is simple enough to survive a little slack, but not this much. It is 1977 in Detroit. John Miller (Alan Ritchson) has just finished probation, gotten his stolen car back, and asked his girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley) to marry him. Then the police break down his door and find drugs planted in his trunk. The setup goes back to Reynolds (Ben Foster), a drug boss and Sophia’s abusive ex, working alongside a dirty cop (Pablo Schreiber) to put John away for good. While John sits in prison, Reynolds works his way back into Sophia’s life and taunts John every chance he gets. Eventually John breaks free with help from two old army friends, and he goes hunting for the man who took everything from him. That plot could move fast and hit hard. Instead, the film spends far too long setting things up, time that could have gone toward building real people instead of simple types. This is where Motor City runs into its biggest problem, and it goes beyond pacing. Stripping away dialogue puts even more weight on which characters get a real inner life and which ones are only there to push the story forward. Sophia never really becomes a person in this film. She exists mainly as something to be won back and forth between two men, a tired old pattern this genre should have left behind by now. There’s a noticeable discrepancy between how much each of the two men who help John escape is able to show in their performance. Amar Chadha-Patel manages to perform brilliantly and with little to work with. He certainly seems like a person who has a story of his own. On the other hand, Boyce plays a much smaller role and does not get to express himself at all. Chadha-Patel manages to communicate just using his body language. A movie that relies on actors’ skills like that should give actors the credit they deserve, regardless of their screen time. To be fair, once Motor City finally lets its violence loose, it earns some credit. The close-quarters fighting feels grounded and brutal, especially a knife fight in a cramped elevator that ranks among the best action of the year. Ritchson finally gets to do more than clench his jaw and glare, and it is easy to see why he is becoming a real action star. If the whole film moved at that speed, this would be a very different review. Much of the storytelling weight falls on music instead of words, and the soundtrack pulls double duty across the whole runtime. Songs from Bill Withers, Fleetwood Mac, David Bowie, and Donna Summer fill in for dialogue, sometimes in clever ways, like pairing a soft, easy love song against a brutal torture scene. More often, though, a scene simply runs long because the song has not finished yet, and the story stalls out waiting for the music to catch up. So Detroit back in the ‘70s has the right look, muscle cars, neon lights, and rainy streets, and it’s really looking great to the eyes, but that’s all there is to it. The film simply wraps a story we have heard many times before in a pretty shell and bases its success on only one idea, and that doesn’t give every character in the movie a chance to become significant. Brownie points for Motor City for not sticking to the beaten path in a genre known for easy punchlines and tough slang. But just being different is not enough. A film that relies on silence to tell its story needs to give each performer room to breathe, which is not the case in this movie.

OUR RATING – A NON-VERBAL 4