Directed By Potsy Ponciroli

Starring – Alan Ritchson, Ben Foster, Shailene Woodley

The Plot – In 1970s Detroit, John Miller (Ritchson) falls for a local gangster’s girl (Woodley). In retaliation, the gangster (Foster) enacts a frame job to send the innocent man to prison. Life ruined, Miller plots a revenge campaign against the man who took his girl away.

Rated R for strong bloody violence, some grisly images, drug content, sexuality/nudity and adult language

MOTOR CITY | Official Trailer ft. Alan Ritchson, Shailene Woodley | Independent Film Company

POSITIVES

Despite the film’s trivial pursuit of a minimalized dialogue gimmick that subjects its characters and audience to more hinderances than expected, there’s legitimately enough compelling aspects to Ponciroli’s execution that surmises his most impressive direction to date, particularly in the abundance of ways that he and the corresponding production help teleport us seamlessly back to the murky depths of Detroit during a time of significant change for the motor city. While some of the impressively transfixing visuals and gorgeous cityscapes can certainly be attributed to durable greenscreen effects helping to appraise some of the familiarity of notable backdrops, the reality is that everything from John Matysiak’s grittily grindhouse cinematography, to the wardrobe and set designs, help flourish an inescapable immersion to what’s artistically rendered, allowing Potsy not only atmospheric context in the form of dirty characters and complex dynamics, the likes of which occasionally subvert what could easily be a one-dimensional star-crossed love story between John and Sophia, but also subscribes sturdy production values to a highly impactful 30 million dollar budget. Speaking of that aforementioned budget, it’s clear that an overwhelming majority of its artistic expense was paid towards attaining the rights to one of the year’s most all-encompassing soundtracks within the distinction of its period piece framing, offering a rich combination of southern rock and dizzying disco that work brilliantly alongside Steve Jablonsky’s energetically eccentric instrumental compositions. Without question, the undeniable reason for music carrying such an immense presence to the integrity of these scenes is that The White Stripes own Jack White serves as the project’s music director, and between a blink-and-you-might-miss-it cameo from White as a restaurant pianist, and his limitless knowledge of culturally cherished classics, the song choices elicit big screen flare that keeps the music video tangibles of these scenes free from compromising cheapness or transparency to their individual helming, in turn producing complex dimensionality in the ways that the lyrical significance of certain tracks echo newfound meaning to particular moments that they’re deposited in. On top of this, if you seek just one reason to give Motor City a chance, look no further than the unchained chaos of the movie’s third act climax, where the final half hour of the movie conceptually feels like the strongest extents to Ponciroli’s direction, especially with a duo of stunning set pieces transpiring some much needed action and annihilation to the pay-off of the storytelling’s favor. During these riveting moments, the explosive devastation and hand-to-hand combat certainly help maintain the urgency and vulnerability of the characters caught in the crosshairs, but Ponciroli is just as effectively influential in the documenting choices that he supplants to claustrophobically chaotic environments, such as one involving two characters in a physical conflict aboard an elevator, with cerebrally swift motions and even single shot long takes driving the lingering uncertainty of what’s transpiring just out of frame. This sequence is definitely my favorite of the entire movie, but even another involving a car chase to the city limits, there’s enough distinguishing elements in palpable fog and wet streetscapes to appreciate the tangibility of on-site photography, proving Potsy’s minimal-but-meaningful directorial experience vital in fleshing out such mood-establishing cinematic appeal, allowing the film to end on a bit of a high note, even if the journey to getting there was a long and bumpy one. Lastly, the emotionally versatile performances from the decorated trio of Alan Ritchson, Ben Foster, and Shailene Woodley help to bring the fears and restlessness of these characters to life, even without the assistance of complimentary dialogue. Ritchson’s physical attributes are certainly balanced by intense sorrow and agonizing anguish of a life gone by behind bars, elevated by monumental losses along the way that gravitationally turn the movie’s tone on its head, and the bountifully toxic lived-in chemistry between Foster and Woodley offers ample opportunity for each of them to convict themselves expressively at all times, cementing beneficially moving work that goes a long way in overriding the minimalized characterization of the screenplay, even without absorbing the entirety of its apparent flaws.

NEGATIVES

While Ponciroli certainly isn’t the first director to minimalize dialogue in a film, even in the 21st century, Motor City marks the memorable moment when I valued it more than any other previous effort at the gimmick, particularly as a result of the distracting emphasis that only increased with the director’s back-breaking persistence towards maintaining it. Sometimes Ponciroli is able to justify a scene’s quiet, either in the placement of the lens being outside of the established realm of where a conversation is taking place visually, or even when characters are colluding sign language to deter law enforcement from overhearing a means of incarceration escape, but an overwhelming majority of interactive scenes between characters strangely and surreally don’t constitute the means of maintaining silence far away from intruding eyes or ears, and while a lack of dialogue certainly inspires audiences to remain faithfully invested to the visuals, in order to maintain placement to the storytelling, it also forces the script to write as obviously and on-the-nose as possible, to convey exposition clumsily to the audience, with the hand-held subtlety of music videos to zero in on visuals that leave no mistake in their connective language. As a result, scenes certainly feel abruptly rushed and condensed without the necessary dialogue used to draw out a scene’s length, but beyond that also tonally paralyzes such tender moments within this love triangle, that are executed in dramatic fashion, yet unknowingly interpreted as unintentionally hilarious at the movie’s most defining moments. As previously assessed, I give these actors a lot of credit in their remarkable ability to act expressively with conveying information visually to the audience, instead of audibly, but silent movies (At least for me) always carry with them that Charlie Chaplin kind of tonal underlining, that, between orchestral narration and corresponding expressions, feel humorous in the ways they’re presented, and while I comprehended some of the movie’s most emotionally devastating moments accordingly, the reality is that they constantly fell flat without the introspection to properly sell them, and it just leaves the entirety of these characters uncompelling by writing that can’t effectively flesh out redeeming morality between any of them. When you consider the complexities of this romantic triangle, you realize that we’re supposed to empathize with John and Sophia because outsider forces have distanced them, but their entanglement only materialized once John stole her from the arms of another man, and when you combine this with Sophia’s own lack of reluctance to eventually reunite with Foster’s Reynolds, you come to experience that the movie constantly reaches for dramatic emotionality that it never even remotely earns, an aspect made all the more ridiculous with a tacked-on ending that not only threatens the appeal of an aforementioned third act climax, but also depicts some laughably bad make-up and prosthetic designs meant render characters at a much older age. The script also has that ransacked feeling that a couple of notable scenes are missing between the respective arcs of John’s time in prison and the reunion of Reynolds and Sophia. I express this nagging feeling because there are moments throughout the exploration where John goes missing from the movie’s focus for an extended period of time, as the script instead works to flesh out what is essentially the toxic bond between the other two, and considering not enough focus is paid to flesh out the tragically traumatic side of John forced to endure a life of incarceration while the woman he loves is being influenced by the very man who put him there, it underscores the empathetic approachability of his character framing, in turn occasionally making him feel like the third wheel to a film that conceptually revolves around him. If this isn’t enough, the clumsily sloppy structuring of the storytelling adopted by the opening act feels a bit too jarringly intrusive to remain compelling, especially in how it abruptly halts progress constantly in the current narrative to flesh out meaning in a relationship to one of our main characters. When it comes to anything pertaining to John, Reynolds, or Sophia, I can take it as vital in attempting to piece together knowledge about them, but when it comes to secondary authority figures who offer little beneficial to the long-term plotting of the movie’s exploration, then it starts to stack heftily on the digestibility of the movie’s pacing, where a linear structure would remove the pressures to answer and absolve as many of the undefined areas that bind the trio before us.

OVERALL
Motor City is a grittily pulpy revenge thriller that divorces itself from audiences, on account of a dialogue-deprived helming that tediously trips over itself in clumsily justifying such a strangely surreal gimmick. While Potsy Ponciroli vividly brings 1977’s Detroit back to life, both with an energetically infused soundtrack and production values that seamlessly transform the movie’s canvas before our very eyes, the film’s aforementioned objective minimalizing leaves this motor running on fumes, with not enough characterization or compelling developments to reach even a 98-minute destination.

My Grade: 5.7 or C-