MOTOR CITY

PREMISE

In 1970s Detroit, John Miller falls for a local gangster’s girl. In retaliation, the gangster 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.

I can’t even do the normal type of review that I want to do for a movie like this, because this movie is hampered by the infernal gimmick that some films are using to tell a story with no dialogue.

Not minimalistic dialogue, mind you. No f dialogue.

To be as fair as I can, I will say that I understand the reasoning for using this gimmick when it comes to cutting the cost of your movie. I understand the use of this gimmick creatively when it comes to certain sections of your films. I don’t know why we need big fight scenes or chase scenes with a lot of dialogue, personally; it seems counterintuitive, and it’s not really realistic. However, to maintain this gimmick for the full length of a feature film is not in any way artistically pertinent. Especially when you’re telling a story like this.

Motor City is a very traditional revenge story. A man is set up for a crime he didn’t commit and made to serve time by a criminal who is jealous over his relationship with a girl. It’s the kind of revenge story that we’ve seen done quite a few times in various different ways. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but that’s not the point. Even if you’ve seen something before a bunch of times, you can have a pretty good time with something like this if the filmmaking is on point. This can go down very easy as a popcorn flick on a Friday night. I can understand a horror movie using this gimmick (such as A QUIET PLACE); I can understand a rom-com using this gimmick (such as THE ARTIST). Stories like this, however, are kind of dependent upon dialogue. Not the action per se, but everything in between:

Example: There’s a scene in this film where a man proposes to his girlfriend. She is silently cooking breakfast. He pulls out a ring, he walks up to her, he looks her deep in the eyes, he drops to one knee… And he silently nods his head. To which the woman silently smiles, nods her head, and they kiss.

Example: There’s a scene in this film where a man is literally in an interrogation room with a recording device that is active. Another man comes into the room to silently signal to him that he set him up for a crime that he didn’t commit, through grunts and shrugs. The man being set up doesn’t respond with dialogue like a normal human being would; he responds with grunts and screams. And that’s the whole scene.

At some point you can tell the writers wrote themselves into a corner, because there are moments that absolutely required dialogue between the characters in order for things to move along. However, the filmmakers are so dedicated to the gimmick that what we get is MUTED DIALOGUE, where we see the characters talking to each other but instead their words are drowned out by some 1970s song playing that symbolically has no relevance to the scene, by the way. It’s adorable to use this gimmick for some of the set pieces. But it is a chore to sit through (even for a running time as short as this one’s) with this gimmick being adhered to as it is. We get Ben Foster, and Shailene Woodley, and Alan Ritchson performances being severely hampered by this gimmick, and it’s just one annoyingly wasted sequence after the other.

Making everything even worse is the fact that the filmmaking is on point. With the exception of the gimmick, literally every other aspect of the filmmaking is done exceptionally well. Literally everything else. The soundtrack kicks ass, the costumes kick ass, the action sequences are absolutely gloriously R-rated, the bloody and beautiful kind. Everything goes correctly…

Except the f* gimmick!!!!!!!!!!!*

I almost would have preferred it if this was poorly done, if the actors were absolutely terrible at their jobs, and if the soundtrack was some boring orchestrated piece that didn’t even fit in with the action being presented on screen. I could have dealt with that, because there’s no potential in that.

There are no what-ifs to entertain about how good this could have been if those things were in play. But that is not the case here. This had the potential to be one of the more underrated films of the year. And the gimmick reduces everything to rubble.

MOTOR CITY is in theaters now.