Review: ‘Motor City’ swerves between operatic action and slow-burn gimmick
2026 / Dir. Potsy Ponciroli
Rating: 3.5/5
Watch if you like: A strange mashup of Drive and Baby Driver, that scene from Eastern Promises if it happened inside an elevator, GETTING REVENGE!!!!!
We open Motor City with a man about as huge and ripped as the Incredible Hulk running in slow motion across a neon-lit rooftop with a body thrown over one arm and a shotgun in his other hand while David Bowie screams out, “And I’ve been putting out fire with gasoline.” He throws the body down to the street below, causing a car crash, and then gets down there to let loose with his shotgun, sending a flurry of change and a wedding ring out from its barrel. It’ll take most of the movie before we make it back to this point, but from the start you know you’re in for something wild.
In various stages of development hell since 2011 and with everyone from Gary Oldman to Jake Gyllenhaal attached at one point, Motor City finally landed with director Potsy Ponciroli (Old Henry) and star Alan Ritchson (Reacher), whose immense size I still can’t get over. Set in Detroit in the ‘70s, the movie has a pretty stock revenge story: guy takes girl from the local cocaine druglord, local cocaine druglord frames guy and sends him to prison, guy gets revenge. The “gimmick,” though, is that Motor City has only five short lines of dialogue across its entire runtime.
That’s not to say the characters don’t talk. When a conversation starts, the camera will pull back behind a door, muffling what they say while a typewriter clacks loudly. In another notable scene, Detroit rockstar Jack White plays loud Christmas carols on a piano. All of this serves to deconstruct the genre by stripping everything to the bare essentials we need to understand the plot. That can often feel more like an experiment than a movie, for both better and worse, but it also forces you to actually watch the movie and be present with the performances, images, and the killer soundtrack. In an era where Netflix makes “content” you can “watch” while you’re doomscrolling on your phone, Motor City can feel radical.
What works best is when the film enters into an operatic, music video-esque territory. During an early sequence, our hero John has just proposed to Sophia (Shailene Woodley) when a gas canister flies through the window to the opening notes of Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain.” Ponciroli lets the song play out in full as heavily armed police bust in and arrest him, and it’s revealed that John’s trunk is full of cocaine planted by a dirty cop (Pablo Schreiber, Nick Sobotka in The Wire). The scene is melodramatic and absurd but also spectacular, and we’re able to glean everything we need to know about John and Sophia’s relationship and the major players for the rest of the movie from this sequence. There’s plenty more great music to come—a prison break scored to the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin” is outstanding—although you’d think a Detroit movie might have some Stooges or MC5.
The unique format also sets up intriguing opportunities for performances and visual casting (Amar Chadha-Patel, playing one of John’s army buddies, has the face of a Spartan warrior). While Ritchson wisely adopts a neutral glare for the bulk of the film, Woodley and Ben Foster, playing Sophia’s druglord ex-boyfriend trying to win her back, have more fun dipping into more over-the-top, silent film-style performances. Foster, in particular, is the highlight of the film, giving his character, Reynolds, a disco and mustache-twirling flamboyancy that you didn’t know you needed in your life.
Your enjoyment is going to vary widely based on attention span, but even a cinephile who thinks Sátántangó’s nearly eight-hour runtime is a walk in the park will find the no-dialogue gimmick runs thin by the halfway mark while waiting for the revenge to finally happen. What starts as genuinely intriguing gets stale and uneven when you realize Motor City doesn’t have that many tricks or twists on the type of pulpy, grindhouse thrillers it’s deconstructing.
That unevenness will be largely forgotten when John and his army ranger friends stage a prison break to rescue the love of his life and take on a horde of druglord goons. The action is spectacularly violent and the lengthy build-up nearly worth the wait. A brutally bloody elevator knifefight—partially shot from the perspective of a knife stuck in a dude’s hand—is an action scene for the ages. While the structure of the movie, for better and for worse, necessitates the slow-burn approach, I wouldn’t mind Ponciroli and Ritchson reteaming for an action thriller that’s as excessive as possible.
Motor City is definitely a cult oddity in the making, where most people who see it in 2026 aren’t gonna get it or have the patience for it. And while certainly flawed, its deep commitment to breaking down and playing with its genre should give it a chance down the line to become a midnight-movie classic where the rough edges won’t matter, and fans will cheer as the hero gets his bloody revenge.