Motor City (2026)

Watched 7/28/26 (theater)

“Experimental” movies are one of my favorite genres to anticipate and one of my most mixed to watch. And when I say experimental, I am not talking about porn. I’m talking about gimmicks.

Take the similar gimmicks of Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project, horror movies filmed entirely in first person. One makes the most of its opportunity to scare through scale, the other through isolation.

Take the conceits of Birdman and 1917, two recent awards favorites that use their “one-shot” mechanics to respectively inject thematic meta-ness to the former’s stageplay setting and a sense of propulsion to the latter’s war-torn landscape.

Then there’s the dialogue-free or near-dialogue free movie. Take recent examples of John Woo’s Silent Night and JC Chandor’s All is Lost. While All is Lost gets by on the credibility of its one-character-lost-at-sea setup, drawing you into his loneliness and desperation, Silent Night was a bit of an odd duck in that there was really no need to be dialogue free. That was a problem.

And I worried that Motor City would just be a Silent Night clone… Both are previewed as revenge stories that have no apparent reason for the lack of dialogue. Sure, Silent Night’s protagonist lost his voice in the opening scene… But why don’t side characters speak? Motor City doesn’t even have the losing-one’s-voice excuse. We watch characters mouth words plenty and even hear a precious few dialogue lines.

But I must say, through an effective blend of juiced music, confident and varied action, a quirky villain that makes the hero easy to root for, and just the right amounts of camp and cleverness, Motor City righted pretty much all of the wrongs I found to pick on a few years ago with Silent Night (which honestly I kind of liked, too).

The music is the number one thing that this movie wants to throw at you. Tracks range from obvious to overused to flat-out cool, but it mostly works because what’s on-screen during these drops is so considered. And the original score itself is a great vibe, always remaining calm, never shifting enough to annoy… Because it would be annoying to have all of the different pop songs AND an original score that jumps around. This Potsy Ponciroli writer-director was a music video guy before he started making movies, and after watching Motor City and catching up on the Western he made before it, Old Henry, I am of the opinion that the music video game really gives him a leg up. Atmosphere is everything with Ponciroli. Both from a musical perspective and visually, this guy knows how to craft a world.

In Motor City, characters are all dressed to stand out, bright colors or shiny new outfits on dark, damp Detroit backgrounds. Neon signs and gun barrels flash on and off against blood and rain. Knives cut through flesh like butter to move in parallel to the smooth beat of the music. And for as much as I usually dislike slow-motion, the way it’s attuned to both the songs and original score here was satisfying enough for me to make an exception for this Ponciroli guy.

The action highlights include, but are not limited to:

-A fairly exciting prison break punctuated by a flaming car getaway (see it and you’ll know what I mean).

-An all-time shock-ending elevator fight. Gross! Ridiculous!

-A nighttime, top-down convertible car chase/fistfight.

-A near-perfect clarity of shots when the violence does escalate, never allowing the layers of the fights to complicate the maximum impacts of blows. The more clearly you show them, the more the audience can feel them. Yes!

-Absolute refusal by the filmmaking team to back down from really cartoonish, bone-breaking physical combat. Really appreciated the attention to detail.

Finally, I need to hold some very special space for Ben Foster, who plays the villain. The guy makes the movie. He is so darn expressive, so insanely sleazy, and so unbelievably committed to this role—and not only is it entertaining as hell, but it makes me root for Ritchson’s main character to beat the bad guy that much more. The idea of this little goblin gangster winning is so ridiculously unfair that you all but need to see Ritchson exact revenge. And I’ll even go so far as to say that his final appearance in the film is one of the funniest of the movie, great way to end the run for this character, whose name escapes me because it’s a largely dialogue-free affair.

I really can’t recommend this to anyone who thinks they’d hate a dialgoue free movie. You probably WOULD hate it. But give it a go if, like me, you didn’t really dig Spider-Man or Odyssey that much. If, like me, you’re looking for some weird counter-programming during the dog days of summer, here.

6.75/10