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As you might have heard, there's not a lot of talking in the new revenge-flick Motor City. Like a kind of twisted take on a silent film, everything about this new film from director Potsy Ponciroli feels like theater, or even opera. To put it more bluntly, the characters in Motor City aren't really multilayered or remotely complex. In all of her scenes, the excellent Shailene Woodley embodies the kind of character from an old pulp novel, someone who can make the whole world fall in love with her just by the way she smokes her cigarette. And, it turns out this kind of old-school cliché is crucial to Motor City. Because if we didn't believe that Woodley's character, Sophia, could make men want to burn the entire world down, nothing else in the film makes sense.
Motor City is an arthouse action film, with a strange, dark sense of whimsy. In the reality of this film, we barely hear anyone speak, meaning actions exist almost in place of the dialogue. Anyone who has taken a creative writing course knows that "show, don't tell" is one of those famous pieces of advice for slick storytelling. Motor City takes that idea to the extreme, but manages to do a bit of telling with very specific needle-drops. If Tarantino's Pulp Fiction were fused with something like Death Wish, the result would be Motor City. It might not show off Alan Ritchson's acting chops as well as the recent Netflix hit, War Machine, but the thrust and style of the movie manages to do the near-impossible: make you forget that Ritchson is famous for playing Jack Reacher.
While the idea of a silent Ritchson might sound familiar to Reacher fans, as John Miller, he's a completely different kind of character. Whereas Reacher is confident and badass, Ritchson plays John as broken, romantic, and very often, desperate. Yes, there's an over-the-top sense of self-determination in this film, but this isn't a Reacher story dressed up in a stylish 1970s almost music video of a film. Could John have been played by someone else? Certainly. Chad St. John's minimalist script for Motor City has been around since 2009, which means there are probably a few alternate dimensions in which other leading men could have handled this role just fine. But Ritchson is uniquely perfect in the film specifically because the one thing he carries into all of his roles is the sense of being an everyman, even though he's absurdly jacked and ridiculously handsome. Just like we need to believe that Sophia would inspire so much devotion from two diametrically opposed men—Ritchson's John and Ben Foster's Reynolds—we also have to believe that our lead hero would inspire a ton of loyalty from his former Vietnam vet buddies, so much so, that they all conspire to break him out of prison.
If you're looking for grittiness, Motor City has it in spades. But if you're looking for gritty realism, you may want to look elsewhere. Motor City isn't exactly a film that favors style over substance, but rather, asserts the notion that style is substance. When we're not getting needle drops from David Bowie or Fleetwood Mac, the score itself is handled by Jack White, who was also the music director on the film more broadly. Essentially, at times, it feels like Motor City is a beautiful version of Boogie Nights, albeit with a different subject matter, a playlist curated and created by one of the coolest living rock geniuses. There's one slightly distracting cameo that White makes in the film, playing the piano, which, for an instant, makes you feel like he's the in-universe narrator, who might turn to the screen at any second and speak. He doesn't, of course, but one of the fun things about Motor City is that the tension comes from both propulsive plot and wondering when the movie is going to break its own rules.
Crucially, the operatic and over-the-top nature of the movie also means that even when the most violent or horrible things are happening, the film seems to have a kind of dark sense of humor about everything. It's not exactly irony, and it's certainly not camp. But to say that Motor City is playing things straight wouldn't be right either.
Without spoiling the overall shape of the film, it's safe to say the trailers have hidden more than a few twists, and the less said about the ending, the better. If you're going into this film expecting a kind of mash-up Tarantino-esque gun battles, with a high-octane revenge movie, you're right. But that doesn't mean it's entirely predictable. There are a few clever turns that will surprise most viewers, all of which are enough to elevate Motor City from being a fun action flick to, occasionally, being a smart, arty movie that happens to have slipped into the appearance of a fast-driving, formulaic revenge movie.
Not everything about Motor City works. But, again, this is mostly connected to how much you can suspend your disbelief. Motor City is a movie that knows you are watching it, and as such, feels like a meta experience throughout. And yet, the best way to enjoy the movie is to not think too hard about any of this, and just let the sick soundtrack and wicked action carry you away.
