Potsy Ponciroli’s Motor City feels like a lost B-movie from a bygone era, channeling the spirit of the vigilante films and other exploitation genres of the 1970s. Like those influences, it plays to the senses through pulse-pounding action. With essentially no dialogue and a constant use of music, the film is less a traditional story than a mood board, given the preponderance of needle drops, from Fleetwood Mac and Donna Summer to David Bowie and Bill Withers, that underscore more than just the film’s frequently inventive set pieces.
The barebones story, set in 1977, follows John Miller (Alan Ritchson), a former convict in Detroit looking to restart his life with his girlfriend, Sophia (Shailene Woodley). But his straitlaced plans are derailed when John’s home is raided with gas canisters and authorities discover scores of drugs inside his car. Sent to prison, John eventually learns that he was framed by Reynolds (Ben Foster), a powerful local gangster and Sophia’s jilted ex-lover. With revenge on his mind, John is determined to take down the man who destroyed his life.
Ritchson brings a cartoonishly magnetic sense of physicality to John, and his character’s pained rage is compelling. Less so is the characterization of the sleazy Reynolds. In brief moments, we get a sense that he’s more than just a vindictive gangster and that he truly loves Sophia, but the film doesn’t delve especially deep into the character. And though Sophia is the impetus for the conflict between the two men, she’s less a fully realized character in her own right than a prize of sorts, a symbol of purity that the two men no doubt see as their salvation.
But Motor City thrives by unshackling itself from the lineaments of a traditional story, and it’s completely, exhilaratingly alive throughout its set pieces, to the point that you’re unlikely to put too much stock in who exactly John’s comrades are or what skin they have in the game in taking on Reynolds. It may not stick the landing, but from an elevator tussle where the camera homes in on a knife while John and a combatant (Pablo Schreiber) brutalize each other in the background, to the slow-motion uncoiling of a wedding ring from the barrel of a shotgun, the film is uniquely immersive when its visuals and music are in perfect lockstep.
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