Would Motor City be a better film without the gimmick? Which is? No dialogue. Or not much anyway. Five lines, the blurbs say, though even that might be an exaggeration. Director Potsy Ponciroli made Old Henry a few years ago, and I liked that. So I gave him the benefit of the doubt and waded in, finding the wordlessness by turns charming, fascinating, irritating and cute but ultimately rewarding.
You have to surrender yourself to his conceit, I reckon, which I eventually did. Dialogue is not strictly that important anyway, this being the story of a dude in 1970s Detroit who is fitted up for a crime he didn’t commit – he’s been seeing some gangster’s girl, see – and then exacts bloody payback when he gets out of jail. An innocent man, a bad guy, a girl, revenge – it’s not as if this were something properly taxing like differential calculus. We know what’s going on without any need for dialogue to spell things out.
Alan Ritchson is the wronged man, Ben Foster the hoodlum who wronged him and Shailene Woodley the girl in the middle. All three are great, though Woodley is the best, projecting damaged trash-sexiness as Sophia. Foster is a lizard-like Reynolds – the middle-aged, “I’m still hip” Peter Sellers might be an inspiration. Ritchson is Miller, your standard-issue action dude, all muscles and attitude. You’d never guess Ritchson trained in musical theatre, but there you are. More versatile than he looks.
Apparently everyone from Nicolas Cage to Jeremy Renner, Dominic Cooper and Jake Gyllenhaal was sounded out for the Miller role, though Gerard Butler was the most heavily pencilled. It figures. The screenplay is by Chad St John, who wrote London Has Fallen, a Butler action movie, which was also fairly terse, though gushingly garrulous compared to this.
Ponciroli has gone all in on the look of the 1970s – big hair, wool and fur, people working blue-collar jobs and plenty of cigarettes being smoked. A fly poster for a gig featuring Spirit, Styx and Cheap Trick on a triple bill can be glimpsed on a wall at one point.
David Bowie’s Cat People comes up big and loud over the opening credits, setting the scene and setting the stage for the role of music in this film, which does a lot of the work dialogue would otherwise do. Sometimes it fills in absent conversation (Bill Withers’ Lovely Day as Miller and Sophia fall in love). Sometimes it makes wry commentary (Fleetwood Mac’s The Chain making the point that actions have consequences). A Christmas carol informs us it’s the festive season. Mozart’s Requiem that there’s been a death. And so on.
The soundscape too is working hard. Sometimes also with a noticeable absence. Other times by being very present.
At all time the lack of dialogue is there, making its scarcity felt. At various points all of the actors flirt with the idea of going silent-movie-actor on the material, but they refrain. Thankfully, once we’re into the final third there is plenty of action, with Miller joined by two sidekicks, Youngblood (Lionel Boyce) and Singh (Amar Chadha-Patel) for tightly choreographed scenes of bloody mayhem featuring lots of close-quarters fighting. In nothing roles, Boyce and Chadha-Patel both make a mark. They’ll be back.
See it as action-movie kabuki theatre, maybe. We know who all the characters are and we understand entirely what’s going to happen. Motor City is all about the joy of genre – how well the actors fulfil their tasks and the little ingenuities the director and his team come up with to give familiar material its own distinct texture.
Motor City – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
