There is a fascinating new trend in cinema gathering steam: action movies with hardly any dialogue. Finland’s Sisu from 2022 shows Nazis being slaughtered without saying much about it, while America’s No One Will Save You from 2023 has a young woman fighting off an alien attack. And now Detroit has Alan Ritchson (that’s right, Reacher himself) starting Motor City eloquently expressing his feelings by throwing somebody off a roof. Motor City has clearly been designed to win the upcoming new Oscar for stunts to the tune of all the biggest seventies hits. Who needs dialogue when things look and sound this good?
It’s 1976 and Miller (Mr. Ritchson) is a factory worker who proposes marriage to his waitress girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley). Their happiness lasts about five seconds before armed cops storm their home and arrest Miller for possession of a huge amount of drugs. It becomes clear that a bad cop (Pablo Schreiber) planted the drugs on behalf of Sophia’s ex Reynolds (Ben Foster, who looks INCREDIBLE in Amy Roth’s seventies costumes), a wealthy villain who really wants her back. Like, will go to all this trouble wants her back. The war on drugs claims another victim, but Miller has three things working in his favour: a good cop (Ben McKenzie, who is always a delight to see onscreen), and two ride-or-die friends from his time in Vietnam, Youngblood (Lionel Boyce) and Singh (Amar Chadha-Patel). [Side note: we do not love the undertones of the names for the characters of color only provided in the credits of Chad St John’s script, but the inclusion of an actor from the Indian diaspora in an American action movie is something new.] And how ride or die are Youngblood and Singh? Well, if your friend is in prison, what else are friends for?
Director Potsy Pinciroli’s previous films Old Henry and Greedy People did not make it clear he had this in him. This movie looks absolutely beautiful — even the argument scene in a high-end restaurant at Christmastime, with Detroit native and executive producer Jack White playing jazzy carols on a piano — and the soundtrack matches the muscle cars and fur coats in creating a coked-out, classy vibe. But Mr. Ritchson is not here to restore his name through a dance-off. He’s here to kill everyone who has even thought about hurting Sophia, and only after that will he get his own personal revenge. The repeated motif of an engagement ring has echoes of The Crow, another movie set in Detroit about a young man going up against vicious gangsters in revenge for a broken relationship, but that is kiddie playtime compared to the violence and mayhem happening here. There are fires, car chases, gunfights, casual torture, Singh smoking on the hood of a car, home invasions, Miller angrily exercising in prison and Reynolds and Sophia dancing to “I Feel Love” under a mirrorball both looking so gorgeous you can understand what all the trouble is for.
Mr. Foster has a gift for playing men horrified at their talent for violence but whose sadness at their own behaviour certainly never stopped them. This makes him one of the very few actors for whom the mere idea of going toe to toe with Mr. Ritchson isn’t ridiculous. (If you’ve seen The Mechanic, in which he does the same with Jason Statham and also has sex with a woman on broken glass in an alley, you have some idea why he was chosen.) Ms. Woodley manages to imbue a trope with some fresh edges and a fighting spirit that just about swerves cliché, but most of all Mr. Ritchson does exactly what we think he’ll do with the calm satisfaction that makes his capacity for sudden violence so terrifying. The only time things go too far are in the knock-down drag-out finale, but you can clearly hear the entire behind-the-scenes stunts, fights and special effects crew putting everything possible into it. And why not grab that Oscar? If more movies are this smart about how they use sound and image to tell a story without words, we might get a revival of so-called silent cinema after all.
Motor City recently played at the Venice Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Venice site for the title.
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