Pretentious, Silent Actioner Motor City Mistakes Artifice for Art

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There’s nothing wrong with a cinematic gimmick. Let’s just get that out of the way: Deployed properly, the right gimmick can refresh a tired or familiar concept, or create a new way to package a classical story structure. I’m certainly not opposed to gimmicks or the creative application of tropes: Look no further than the list I once assembled for Paste of the best cinematic jump scares of all time. But the thing that a film like Potsy Ponciroli’s newly premiered (at Venice Film Festival) Motor City doesn’t seem to understand is that when you alter one dimension of a film for the sake of headline-grabbing gimmickry, you should probably consider how your gimmick requires the rest of the film to change, in order to keep up with it.

For the Alan Ritchson-starring action revenge flick, that simple gimmick is a lack of dialogue–the entirety of Motor City has only four or five lines of clear dialogue in it, depending on how you define them. Its simplistic and immediately obvious thesis is to point out how audience and filmmaker familiarity with beloved genre tropes can fill in all the gaps to create a story that is perfectly legible even without the spoken word, but Ponciroli (and writer Chad St. John) seemingly never bothered to stop for a moment to ask themselves whether removing dialogue would actually add anything else to the experience, or how the rest of the film should evolve in the absence of all that talk and exposition. Though it can eventually boast some entertainingly gruesome action in its last act, Motor City is far too overwrought and self-satisfied in arriving at it, a film desperate to be overrated by genre geeks who are happy to find a reason to praise something that is ultimately deeply familiar and not all that interesting. This is a showy exercise, Ponciroli purposefully hamstringing one dimension of his film and then expecting to be praised for rising above the very adversity he created, and not even the bloodthirsty action can salvage it from pretentiousness.

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Ritchson, the incredibly muscular, statuesque star of Amazon Prime Video’s Reacher, is playing John Miller, an out-on-parole, ex-military dude of some kind who must embark on the requisite path of vengeance after being set up by a drug lord and his crooked cop cronies, made to take the fall so said drug lord can swipe his gal. He’s introduced in media res, running down thugs and firing sawed-off shotguns in 1977 Detroit, to the strains of David Bowie’s “Cat People (Putting Out Fire)”, a song that, beyond already being cinematically claimed in an iconic way by Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, also came out in 1983 and is distinctly inappropriate for the not-trying-to-be-anachronistic setting of Ponciroli’s film. Not that the filmmaker cares, mind you. He mostly just wants to hover the frame in the vicinity of Ritchson, who comes off here as a lumbering and not particularly smart or engaging brick of meat, unable to show much of the personality or charm of Reacher when he’s reduced to only the most basic of tropes. You can’t argue that he doesn’t look the part, however.

Still, the characterization of Ritchson as silent badass–or Ben Foster as the squirmy drug boss villain Reynolds–are positively Charlie Kaufman-esque compared to the utterly thankless female lead role of Sophia, played with all the wooden energy it deserves by Shailene Woodley. This character is one of the most regressive I’ve seen in this style of action film in quite a while; the sort of helpless and foolish damsel that could have been culled directly from the era in which Motor City is set. Both Ritchson’s hero and Foster’s villain are in love with her, and both very much willing to kill for her, but Sophia is never afforded the slightest bit of charm (beyond her obvious physical gifts and slinky ‘70s dresses) to justify why she inspires so much devotion and obsession on her behalf. She’s portrayed as a fool more than anything, immediately crawling back to the one and only person who could have framed John Miller after he goes down on drug charges, and being seduced by finery and luxurious living as she places herself firmly under the thumb of the villain. Woodley’s character is treated like a piece of luggage, then as a helpless victim, and then as nothing more than motivation for her raging former lover, who would likely be expected to want vengeance on her just as much as he would on the villain. Women in Steven Seagal movies have been given more agency than this.

The unusual thing about Motor City, though, isn’t its underlying sexism but the way that despite mostly employing a gimmick such as “no dialogue,” the film still chooses to largely construct itself in exactly the same way it presumably would if it had a more conventional delivery. Exposition scenes, for instance, still frequently happen in Motor City … we just don’t get to hear them. Instead, some artifice always intervenes–we drift out of the room and watch the distorted sound of people talking through a transparent window in a door, or the conversations simply take place during extended flashback montages set not just to period music clips, but entire songs, which obscure the dialogue. As much fun as it is to bask in some ‘70s radio classics–I was tickled, hearing the first few bars of Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat,” which goes on to play in its entirety–you end up wondering why Ponciroli and co. didn’t rework these scenes to have more genuinely silent characters communicate visually or in other subtle, physical ways with each other. As is, it’s typically not that they don’t talk; merely that we’re not privy to the frequent talking they’re doing. With that said, there are a few infuriatingly silent stretches in which the characters refuse to speak directly to one another even when the scene demands they do so–most notably a sequence in which Reynolds visits Sophia in a diner and they spend about five minutes of back-and-forth staring at each other before she finally whispers a “hello.” It’s a moment that is maddening in its padding, with no way to justify the amount of time it occupies.

The strength of the gimmick is likewise undercut by the curious decision to abandon it here and there for no discernible reason–why hold almost entirely to not having any dialogue when, at the end of yet another conversation scene we don’t get to hear, Sophia clearly announces “Merry Christmas” during her departure? Why, in another scene, does an unnamed background character get to spout off a full sentence before being subsequently tortured for information by Miller’s old army buddy confederates? There’s no clear rhyme or reason as to when Motor City’s stylistic choices are being treated like gospel or carelessly discarded, and no defining aesthetic other than a fondness for hokiness–never more strong than in the moment that Ponciroli fades from the chalk image of a Lion King logo-looking piece of graffiti into Ritchson’s face in prison, now sporting matching lion mane hair and beard. Here’s hoping the audience can pick up on the symbolism.

With all that said, the actual action of Motor City, once it begins to really arrive in earnest in its third act, is so wildly fun, stylized and gratuitous that it almost becomes worth the price of admission despite the praise-seeking genre experimentation you’ve waded through to get there. This is when Ritchson is really unleashed as a physical performer, and unsurprisingly it’s when he shines–particularly during a pitched battle in an elevator that is genuinely shocking in its brutality and over-the-top violence. It’s quite an evolution for the film, as one goes from largely eye-rolling at the labored style, to guffawing with delight once people are suddenly being impaled and shot to bits, instead of trudging through ‘70s rock radio music videos. For these moments, Motor City roars to life, indicating that it would have been better situated with more of this kind of high-octane offense and absurd action–Miller, for instance, having a fistfight with a villain on top of a speeding car with no driver. It’s a frustrating indication of the exciting, pulse-raising film that Ponciroli clearly could have extended to feature length, if he hadn’t been so one-dimensionally focused on the constraints of Motor City’s gimmick.

That final third does salvage Motor City to some degree, at least throwing some red meat (and a shocking amount of blood) to the action junkies, but it’s ultimately not enough to dislodge unnecessary stylization as its defining feature. It’s just difficult to overcome something like an entire Christmas season musical medley, used for labored, Kingsman-style “ironic” action scene accompaniment, or the requisite sequences of the helpless female lead being repeatedly tricked, exploited and reduced to chattel. Perhaps more than anything, the experience of watching Motor City evokes unwittingly landing on one of those fake A.I. trailers that have become a plague upon YouTube, and realizing halfway through that the uncanniness suggests a vague caricature of human behavior rather than anything genuine. This could have been a more visceral period action flick, but it’s too distracted by the temptation to simply raid mom and dad’s old LPs. That might be a win for Al Stewart, but not for us.

Director: Potsy Ponciroli
Writer: Chad St. John
Stars: Alan Ritchson, Ben Foster, Shailene Woodley, Pablo Schreiber, Ben McKenzie, Lionel Boyce, Amar Chadha-Patel
Release date: Aug. 30 (Venice), Sept. 4 (TIFF), 2025

Jim Vorel is Paste’s Movies editor and resident genre geek. You can follow him on Twitter or on Bluesky for more film writing.