‘Motor City’ review: Seventies Detroit revenge thriller proves more style than substance

Dir: Potsy Ponciroli. USA. 2025. 103mins

Detroit, 1977. Reformed ex-con John Miller (Reacher star Alan Ritchson) has been discharged from probation, and has just proposed to his girlfriend, Sophia (Shailene Woodley). Then armed cops raid his home and discover drugs in his car. A cut and dried case. Except for the fact it’s a set up, organised by Sophia’s abusive gangster ex, Reynolds (Ben Foster, with a coke nail and a highly flammable wardrobe of nylon shirts). John sets out for revenge, armed with innumerable gun but next to no words – the gimmick for this schlocky action picture is that it’s almost entirely dialogue-free. The story unfolds through ambitious action sequences and montages; the film helps itself liberally to the cheese buffet that is 1970s MOR rock.

Music does much of the heavy lifting 

This Venice Spotlight premiere is worlds away from Potsy Ponciroli’s previous Venice title, the 2021 competition entry Old Henry, a gritty, old school Western starring Tim Blake Nelson. Motor City is a long-gestating project with a troubled history. A version of the 2009 Black Listed Chad St. John screenplay was due to go into production in 2012 with Albert Hughes directing and Gerard Butler starring. But the project collapsed just weeks before its scheduled start date. Over a decade later, the film is finally completed.

Whether or not it was worth the wait will depend on audiences’ tolerance for slow motion shots of muscle-bound lunks walking away from explosions, neon and car headlights reflected in rain-soaked asphalt and a lurid, comic book-inspired production design. This is deliberately stylised and intentionally pulpy stuff, a B movie that is not, presumably, intended to be taken too seriously. Selling points include the impressively gnarly stunt work and action set pieces, plus Ben Foster channelling 1970s Brut advert energy combined with pure evil.

The decision to strip back the dialogue is, in some ways, a smart one – it’s a distinctive and unusual feature in a movie which is otherwise extremely generic and familiar. Actual lines spoken include “I loved you” (howled through the glass of a police interrogation room by Woodley); “I loved her” (sneered by Foster) and “Ow” (said by pretty much everyone in the cast, most frequently after John’s breezeblock-sized fist has made contact with their face). But the lack of dialogue does mean that many of the filmmaking choices have to be quite obvious in order for the audience to follow the intricacies of the story.

Music does much of the heavy lifting when it comes to threading the picture together. Some of the choices can lean a little too far towards the obvious – Bill Withers’ ’Lovely Day’, for the scene in which John proposes to Sophia; Donna Summer’s ’I Feel Love’ for Sophia’s mink-swaddled luxury honeymoon with Reynolds (they are reunited after she dumps John, believing him to be a drug wholesaler). More interesting and playful are the clashing juxtapositions of music and subject matter: a vividly detailed torture scene set to Starbuck’s breezy, easy listening standard ’Moonlight Feels Right’ or John’s daring jail break accompanied by The Moody Blues’ overwrought ballad ’Nights In White Satin’. But the excessive use of music, and the highly choreographed shooting style, means that the film looks and feels like an extremely violent extended music video.

This is not a film that shies away from overt corniness. An audience in the right mindset might have plenty of fun with, for example, the scene in which Reynolds has a slo-mo rage-pain meltdown and attacks the floral display on his dead wife’s coffin – a wife, it’s worth mentioning, he routinely injected with heroin to make more biddable. Or the scene in which John shaves his 1970s leonine mane of hair to a revenge-ready buzzcut, then punches the mirror into tiny pieces. Or, for that matter, the genuinely impressive sequence in which John and Reynolds have a punch-up in a speeding, out-of-control convertible. All that said, the rule that no dialogue is better than bad dialogue doesn’t necessarily hold in this case.