"Motor City" misses the mark and turns into a spoof of itself

 

In some ways, Motor City recalls movies of yore, the grindhouse flicks of the 1970s. You know, cheap lighting, stylized gore, and moral ambiguity across all the characters. But the biggest problem with this Potsy Ponciroli feature, which focuses about a wrongly imprisoned brute (Alan Ritchson) whose escape from prison sets him against the crooks who put him there - and also stole the woman of his dreams, Sophia (Shailene Woodley), is that its too pretentious for its own good.

Choosing to carry out his narrative mostly dialogue free (about 98% of the narrative is silent, accompanied only by classic tunes of the 1970s), Ponciroli fails, and not so admirably. We don't know these "mute" characters at all: not what makes them tick, not what warms their hearts - and especially not why Sophia so easily reunites with Reynolds (Ben Foster), the gangster whose villainy ruins the protagonist's life. 

There is a time and a place for a silent work to blossom (The Artist, first hour of Wall-E, etc) in today's Hollywood. But Motor City spoofs the gimmick into a parody that plays like a hundred-minute long movie trailer, going nowhere. It's as miscalculated a movie as there's been in 2026.

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