There is something very strange about Motor City... It looks like the kind of movie I normally enjoy and then the movie does something I wasn't expecting...
It barely talks and I mean barely...
The film follows John Miller, a working-class ex-convict in 1977 Detroit who is trying to rebuild his life and settle down with Sophia, played by Shailene Woodley..
Unfortunately, Sophia's violent gangster ex, Reynolds, played by Ben Foster, isn't interested in letting either of them have a happy ending. John gets framed for a crime and sent back to prison and when he eventually gets out, his entire existence has basically been reduced to one thing.. revenge, and honestly?.. the story is simple.. very simple but I don't think that is necessarily a bad thing...
The biggest experiment is the silence
The director, Potsy Ponciroli, basically decided to strip away most conventional dialogue... The movie communicates through facial expressions, movement, music and violence rather than long conversations and exposition...
At first, I thought this was going to be terrible, Then I realized I was actually getting into it...
There's something almost old-school about watching a character communicate through a look rather than explaining exactly what he's thinking...
John doesn't need to give us a five-minute speech about how angry he is...
You can see it, you can see it in the way he walks, you can see it in the way he looks at people, you can see it when he gets violent and Ritchson is surprisingly good at carrying that kind of performance...
We've already seen him dominate physically in Reacher, but Motor City gives him a different challenge. He has to sell a lot of emotion without relying on dialogue but the silence also becomes a problem and this is where I think the movie loses some points...
There are moments when I genuinely wanted somebody to just talk, Not because I needed everything explained to me, but because some of the characters deserved more development...
Shailene Woodley's Sophia, Ben Foster's Reynolds and several of the supporting characters could have been much more interesting if we were allowed inside their heads a little more... Instead, the movie sometimes feels like an extremely expensive music video...There were times when I was thinking.. "Okay... I get it. The man is angry. You can let him speak now."...
The action is where the movie really comes alive... And this is probably the biggest reason I would recommend it...
The violence is nasty...
Not superhero violence...
Not Even the kind where somebody gets punched 17 times and stands up perfectly fine...
People get hurt...
People get shot...
People get thrown around and John takes an unbelievable amount of punishment....
The movie has a dirty, gritty 1970s crime-film atmosphere, and the cinematography does a good job making Detroit feel like another character in the story...
The soundtrack also deserves serious credit. Music is doing a huge amount of the storytelling here, with songs from artists including Fleetwood Mac, Donna Summer, David Bowie and Bill Withers contributing heavily to the film's identity.
Ben Foster is... Ben Foster...
I don't know how this man keeps doing it...
Give Ben Foster a morally questionable character and he will find a way to make him uncomfortable....
Reynolds is the kind of villain you don't need to understand completely.. you just hate him and Foster plays him with exactly the right amount of instability...
My problem with the movie is that I think Motor City had the ingredients to be something special.. the concept is interesting, the cast is strong, the setting is great, the soundtrack is excellent...
Alan Ritchson fits the physical side of the role perfectly... The action is brutal, the visual style is probably the strongest part of the whole thing but the movie sometimes sacrifices character development for style and that's a trade-off I'm not always willing to make...
Rating: 70/100
