\n\tGive me a brooding mid-1970s Detroit nightscape stained with grubby neon, drop a body with a severed leg off a building and crank up a David Bowie song and you have my attention. But director Potsy Ponciroli\u2019s vicious revenge saga, Motor City, while impressively sustained on many levels and even fun in a mindless exploitation way, can\u2019t get around a gimmicky script by Chad St. John populated with pulp-crime stereotypes in boilerplate situations.<\/p>\n
\n\tA glowering Alan Ritchson<\/a> brings gravitas by virtue of his hulking physical presence alone, but Shailene Woodley<\/a>, Ben Foster<\/a> and Pablo Schreiber<\/a> are stuck playing characters too familiar to pack much heat.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\tMotor City\t\t<\/p>\n \n\t\t\t\t\tThe Bottom Line<\/p>\n \tBracing for a while, then just flashy and thin.<\/p>\n \t\t\t\t\t\t\tVenue<\/strong>: Venice Film Festival (Spotlight) \n\tThe audacious stunt behind the project is to build an adrenaline-charged crime thriller almost entirely without dialogue. It requires skill to sustain such a conceit and Ponciroli largely pulls it off, but a stunt is exactly what it ends up being. For a while the fabulous \u201870s needle drops \u2014 Fleetwood Mac, Bill Withers, Donna Summer, the Moody Blues \u2014 keep it punchy and there\u2019s certainly some well-staged action, notably toward the end. But you can only get so far with one-dimensional characters.<\/p>\n \n\tThankfully, Ritchson, still very much in the built-like-a-brick-shithouse punisher mode of Reacher<\/a>, doesn\u2019t require a lot of nuance as John Miller, a blue-collar guy who gets caught in the web of scuzzy underworld drug kingpin Reynolds (Foster). That\u2019s Miller disposing of a body in the kinetic opening before hitting the streets, blasting the head off one bad dude, getting thrown from the hood of another guy\u2019s muscle car \u2014 in slow-mo, Ponciroli\u2019s favorite device \u2014 and shooting at the driver as a freeze-frame leaves him hanging.<\/p>\n \n\tThe timeline then jumps around, winding back first to Miller proposing to his diner waitress girlfriend Sophia (Woodley), just in time for cops to lob a teargas cannister through the window and burst in. They arrest him for the major cocaine haul found in his car trunk, which, unbeknownst to Sophia, was planted there. No prizes for guessing which of the detectives on the scene is corrupt \u2014 clean-cut Kent (Ben McKenzie<\/a>) in his respectable gray suit, or Savick (Pablo Schreiber) in his black leather regulation pimp-daddy trench coat.<\/p>\n \n\tTossed into prison on false charges, Miller\u2019s memories return to the night he met Sophia. He is smoking a cigarette in the alley behind a club when she comes slinking over to get a light, poured into a barely-there gold metallic mesh minidress. She soon locks him in a kiss, which Reynolds isn\u2019t too happy about when he steps out of the club, the ensuing altercation sealing the hostility between the two men.<\/p>\n \n\tBack in the movie\u2019s present, Reynolds has no qualms about revealing he was behind the frame-up, dropping in on Miller in the police interrogation room just to toss the engagement ring the arrested man gave to Sophia and leave without a word. Reynolds goads Miller by sending a photo of himself getting cozy with Sophia, and in a moment both lurid and laughable, the prisoner visualizes the two of them getting naked and going at it right outside the cell.<\/p>\n
Cast<\/strong>: Alan Ritchson, Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster, Pablo Schreiber, Lionel Boyce, Amar Chadha-Patel, Ben McKenzie
Director<\/strong>: Potsy Ponciroli
Screenwriter<\/strong>: Chad St. John
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1 hour 43 minutes\n\t\t<\/p>\n