Motor City Review: Speak Softly and Kick Ass

Hey Academy voters. I have some names for you. Remember how the production design team made you feel like you were in the cinematic Los Angeles of 1969 when you were watching Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood? Well, production designer Mayne Berke, art director Rick Dennis, costume designer Amy Roth, and set decorator Chryss Hionis manage the same immersiveness for mid-Seventies Detroit in bloody-knuckled vengeance-fueled rampage Motor City. It may not be 100% historically accurate, but when drive-in projectionists dream of the home of the MC5, Blue Collar, Hemi ‘Cudas, Elmore Leonard, and Roger Corman, it’s Motor City that revs up in their heads. Fer chrissakes, it’s directed by Potsy Ponciroli (Old Henry) and written by Chad St. John (London Has Fallen), two names that sound like something an Italian action producer would foist on their filmmakers to make their movie sound more American. When you talk about the romance of the B-movie, this is exactly what you mean.

It’s a time and place of muscle cars and barbed wire, crooked cops and good men with a troubled past. It’s also a time where actions speak louder than words, and more often. John Miller (Alan Ritchson, The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, Lazer Team) doesn’t say much. In fact, he doesn’t say anything, and neither does anyone else. There’s barely a dozen audible words to be heard from anyone, and most of them are spoken by Sophia (Shailene Woodley, Divergent, Ferrari), the heart-of-gold diner waitress that the tongue-tied Vietnam war veteran, fresh off parole, fell for like a wide-eyed schoolboy. Bad news for him, so did the local drug kingpin, Reynolds (Ben Foster, Leave No Trace, Hell or High Water), who has the local cops in his pocket. Well, all aside from Detective Kent (Ben McKenzie, The O.C., Johnny Got His Gun, Everyone Is Lying to You For Money), the one straight arrow in the department, but even he cannot stop John getting put away for 25 years on fake charges just so Reynolds can steal the sweet yet slinky Sophia away.

It’s the old story: The only thing worse than messing with a man with seemingly nothing left to lose is to take the one thing that kept him hanging on. The kind of man that can bloodily bust out of prison, wielding a sawn-off shotgun single-handed, and do whatever it takes to set the world to rights.

Plans to shoot Motor City have been floating since St. John’s screenplay made the famous Black List of great unproduced scripts in 2009, with every hot leading man from Chris Evans to Jake Gyllenhaal and Gerard Butler lined up at some point to play the taciturn John. All those earlier failures were worth it to give Ritchson the kind of role he was carved from granite to play. The man-mountain star of Reacher is not the new Schwarzenegger or Stallone. He’s the natural heir to legit tough guys Bo Svenson and Charles Bronson, as much gristle and scar tissue as he is muscle, but with an innate charm that slices through his tough guy exterior like a prison shank.

Brutal, gaudy, gritty, glamorous, sexy, heartbreaking, and with enough smoke, fire, bone-breaking fistfights and skull-splitting gunplay to make Walter Hill proud, Motor City is not all carried on Ritchson’s impossibly broad and charismatic shoulders. In fact, everyone is perfect here, with Woodley enchanting as the last good woman in a bad town, and Austin native McKenzie bringing back his “young Jim Gordon” Gotham energy. As for Foster, his satin-shirted disco sleaze could have rolled in a coke-fueled fury straight off the set of Saturday Night Fever’s greasiest scenes.

Sure, the “no dialogue” thing is a gimmick. And sure, it’s the most generic script you can imagine. But Motor City takes those bare bones and makes them beefy. It’s a loving tribute to 1970s revenge and crime flicks as perfectly arranged as every hair in Jack White’s impeccable sideburns. The Detroit musical legend does much to establish mood with a soundtrack mixtape that takes well-worn classics from David Bowie and Fleetwood Mac, interwoven with deeper cuts from Starbuck and Sniff ‘n’ the Tears, and makes them pulse-pounding complements to the film’s smash-mouth styling. Like White’s ripsaw rock on the essential soundtrack inclusion “Archbishop Harold Homes,” raw action was never so perfectly polished.

Motor City

2026, R, 109 mins. Directed by Potsy Ponciroli. Starring Alan Ritchson, Ben Foster, Shailene Woodley, Ben McKenzie.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

Find movie times.

The post Motor City Review: Speak Softly and Kick Ass appeared first on The Austin Chronicle.