Motor City

Motor City is a gorgeous slab of pulp that proves a feature can run on motion and pictures alone, right up until it needs a woman to have an interior life.

Detroit, 1977. John Miller (Alan Ritchson) works the auto line after Vietnam with two friends who would walk into a burning building for him. He recovers a stolen car that still holds the engagement ring he means for Sophia (Shailene Woodley). He proposes. A smoke canister hits the window. Police pour in. Someone stuffed the trunk with cocaine and called it in. John goes to prison. Behind the frame sits Sophia’s other man: a cocaine kingpin with Detroit cops on payroll. From there the movie turns into a revenge machine with almost no spoken words.

Put the phone down. Five lines of dialogue across a hundred and three minutes means you either watch or you miss the movie. There is no bathroom break that does not cost you story. That choice is the point. Motor City remembers why they used to call these things motion pictures. I kept thinking of Hardcore Henry (2015), which locked you in a first-person stunt machine. This film locks you in faces, timing, and bodies. Actors have nowhere to hide. Facial reactions matter. How a hand hits a door matters. You see the small cracks in a performance because the movie leaves you nowhere else to look. Those cracks make it feel like somebody tried something. In a year where people keep calling big studio swings “epics,” Motor City is the one that actually gambles on form. It is not perfect. It is fun. It is strange. Give it credit for that.

The needle drops help sell the bet. Hollywood trained us to flinch when a classic song lands on a fight scene, because half the time the track does marketing while the image sits there looking proud. Here the period rock and disco sit against rumbling 70s synth and earn their keep. With no dialogue, the music gets to be the movie instead of a costume. The Act 3 stretch drops the karaoke hits for colder synth and the combat gets meaner for it. I have watched a lot of action. The elevator fight and the runaway-car chase still feel like new toys.

Then the romance curdles. John’s revenge doubles as a mega-simp plot. The kingpin frames him. The same kingpin also wants Sophia. John’s military buddies load up for a guns-blazing raid and put their lives on the line. Everyone does. All of it orbits Woodley’s character. John first meets her by interrupting an alley beating from that kingpin. That is fedora white-knight writing, and in the dating climate we live in, it reads tone-deaf.

Spoilers for the prison stretch: while John sits inside, the abusive ex visits Sophia at her waitress job. You wait for violence. What you get is him winning her back. Montages later, she remarries into gold-leaf luxury while John pines from a cell for a woman who believed the charges and went home to the man who ruined him. Empathy for John’s late-game crusade gets hard. The girl belongs to the streets.

Yes, the frame and the years stolen from him are enough motive on their own. His war buddies stay resourceful and loyal. I still do not believe none of them ever says the plain thing: we do this for the kingpin who took your life, we leave the penthouse wife where she is, and you are Alan Ritchson, you will find a nicer girl.

Motor City is the kind of action film that shows up every few years. Just below great. A good time. The spectacle of a near-silent 70s haze with synth under the best fights should be dynamite, and for long stretches it is. The story leaves more on the table than the craft does, and it is less broken than the stuffiest takes claim. If you have a free weekend and you can sit still, go.