I love an early showtime. I’d go to the theater at 7 AM if they’d let me. There’s nothing better than leaving the cold, dark theater and stepping out into a hot, sunny, summer day. In fact, I was lucky enough to get tickets to see The Odyssey in 70mm IMAX in August with a start time of 7:45 AM. I realize it may not be an ideal time for most people; but I, unfortunately, am a morning person. It’s a hangup from my time in the Marines that I haven’t been able to shake. I get up around 5:30-6:00 AM and go to sleep around 10:30.
Why am I telling you all this? Am I someone who normally over-shares? Only out of necessity; like when I’m trying to avoid talking politics with affluent boomers, or my family. Maybe I’m just trying desperately to avoid talking about Motor City, because I know there isn’t much to be said about this interminable film. And maybe that’s a good thing: I don’t have to write a 1,300 word-count piece on every film I see, right?
Right?
Motor City (2025), written by Chad St. John (please let that be his God-given name) and directed by Potsy Ponciroli, follows John Miller (Human wall Alan Ritchson), a Vietnam vet in 1970s Detroit. Fresh off of probation, he proposes to his girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley) moments before he’s carted off by the police for possession of no less than twelve bricks of drugs. As we learn through flashbacks, John has been setup by Sophia’s ex-boyfriend and drug lord Reynolds (Ben Foster). While in jail, John plots his revenge against Reynolds and the corrupt cops that put him away. With the help of two old Army buddies (Lionel Boyce and Amar Chadha-Patel), he breaks out and wreaks havoc.
It’s a story that I personally have seen probably a hundred times and, God willing, will see a hundred more. I’m a big fan of sleazy 70s exploitation films: Death Wish, Death Wish Part 2, Death Wish 3, Death Wish: The Crackdown, Death Wish: Face of Death, 10 to Midnight– Wait, am I just listing Charles Bronson movies again? Sorry, Black Mama, White Mama, Death Game, ‘Gator Bait, Last House on the Left, etc. I really could go on. None of these films are good, but they’re fun.
Exploitation films spend the first 10-20 minutes setting you up with a happy protagonist and their perfect family, take it all away, and the rest of the film is this protagonist gleefully killing unrepentant murderers. It’s a classic equation that has served movies for decades, hell Tarantino made a career out of exploitation films.
So why are you getting a sense that I didn’t like the film despite it checking all the boxes of a good movie by my standards?
If the IMDB trivia is to be believed (and if we can’t trust the anonymous “Trivia” section, who can we trust?), one of the producers, Greg Silverman wanted to “create a cinematic experience that required no translation, allowing viewers worldwide to experience the story identically regardless of language or cultural background”, which is to say, there’s maybe four lines of dialogue across the entire 103-minute runtime.
It’s a gimmick. Now I’m not saying it’s a cheap gimmick, or that gimmicks don’t allow you to make a great film; The Raid: Redemption‘s gimmick is that a group of cops have to fight their way up a high-rise apartment building filled with criminals, and that’s a near-perfect film. Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope was filmed to look like one continuous shot and that’s a masterpiece, hell, The Odyssey was filmed entirely on IMAX cameras. My belaboured point is that gimmicks aren’t all bad.
However, it doesn’t work in this film. I think Alan Richson is a great physical actor, but I don’t think he works in a film where he’s silent. And there’s scenes where we are shown the inner workings of Reynold’s drug empire that left me more confused than when it started. It looked like he was mixing drugs into paint that he was then creating artwork with? If I googled it, I’m sure I could find out, but I don’t want to be put on an FBI watchlist for googling, “Mixing drugs into paint why?”
When you remove all dialogue from your film, the lines you leave in have to really hit the audience hard. The majority of the dialogue left in is incidental stuff like “What are you looking at?” and “I’m just messing with you”. Since these are some of the only lines in the film, you’re left with them bouncing around in your head throughout.
So you’ve taken the dialogue out of your film, now what? Fill it with a kick-ass soundtrack! That’s where this film shines. You got Bill Withers, David Bowie, Donna Summers, Fleetwood Mac, and just about every hit of the 70s. Unfortunately, the composed music couldn’t clash harder with the sounds of the 70s. It’s a synth-driven score that sounds like royalty-free music you would download off a website that hasn’t been updated since 2010. It’s so tonally different from the setting and soundtrack that it takes you out of the film and leaves you scratching your head.
The action, while sparse, is pretty solid. I was looking up the Stunt Coordinator to see what else he had worked on and came across a profile picture that made me green with envy. Dear reader, let me introduce you to Doug Coleman: The coolest man to ever live.
He did stunts in just about everything from Cast Away to One Battle After Another, mainly a performer, and apparently he’s a magician, too. If there’s one positive I can take away from the film, it’s him and his sick profile picture.
Overall, Motor City wasn’t for me, despite being their target audience. I begged and pleaded with the movie to “Say something, anything. Don’t look at me like that, just tell me what you want!” Its 103 minute runtime felt closer to two hours. That’s another thing about exploitation films: 80 minutes or less, otherwise you’ll lose your audience, and I think there’s moments that could be trimmed to get this down to a quicker runtime.
The caveat to seeing an early showing of a film is that if the film underperforms to my expectations, I’m kind of in a funk for a while. As we were leaving the auditorium, Page and I passed by a showing of The Odyssey showing in an IMAX auditorium, and she said, “How about we dip in here for a little bit to wet our whistle?” I almost took her up on the offer, but remembered how we cheated Cinemark out of $14.50 earlier in the week and decided we better not tempt fate twice.
RATING: 2/5, Maybe Action films Do Need Dialogue
Who should see this film?
- Classic Car guys (we all know one)
- Wig-lovers (Alan Ritchson is wearing no less than two wigs)
- Fans of multi-hyphenate stunt performers
- The guy that complains “Nolan’s films have wayy too much talking ” (we all know one)
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