As someone who dabbles in creative enterprises on occasion, I love a good restriction. Putting guardrails on art or writing is a terrific exercise to work through dry spells of inspiration or to discover new possibilities. I'm generally less enthusiastic about finished projects that strictly adhere to these restrictions throughout their final forms. Whether it's viewed as a limitation or a conceptual framework, I find films operating within this space to feel more gimmicky than innovative: the single shot film, the "real time" film, and even some single location films weigh heavy with filmmaking artifice and rarely are better for it. So it was with some trepidation that I sat down for Potsy Ponciroli's nearly wordless 70s period revenge thriller,
Motor City.
City is the story of John Miller (Alan Ritchson) an ex-con who finds himself on the wrong side of a narcotics frame job after he takes up with a local gangster's girlfriend. Miller teams up with old army pals to bust out of the joint and take down the gangster (Ben Foster) and his corrupt Detroit cop allies. To his credit, Ponciroli has already established himself as genre stylist with his remarkably sturdy Western siege film,
Old Henry, which he also worked on with cinematographer John Matysiak.
Henry featured a great lead performance from Tim Blake Nelson but some of its best sequences are realized without much dialogue at all.
City is operating in a very different milieu, but it's clear that Ponciroli brought similar attention to detail for how the action plays out on the screen. It's a heavily stylized picture of 70s Detroit (New Jersey largely standing in for the titular town) that exhibits more cinematic glamour than it does urban grit. Pinciroli and Matysiak capture striking images of nighttime bathed in neon, streetlights illuminating water erupting from a shattered fire hydrant, and showers of sparks raining down from improvised pipe bombs Miller and his crew unleash in a warehouse. The warm color palette and slow motion photography paired with a soundtrack of eclectic 70s bangers result in something closer to a music video or cutscene than they remind me of any grindhouse classics. The music essentially acts as another character but the entirety of the sound design is rather rich and helps to fill details that dialogue may have provided in a traditional film. Beyond the soundtrack, there is a pulsing synth score courtesy of Steve Jablonsky that both provides contrast to the rock music and segues rather nicely into some of the Moroder-penned needle drops.
Performance takes on a fascinating dimension in Motor City as so many scenes rely on gesture and expression to convey the emotional core of the story even when specifics are lacking. Not to say that the plot beats are difficult to parse, but the three main leads, Ritchson, Foster, and Shailene Woodley as their shared object of desire, gamely take on the challenge. They are, consequently, big performances that read well without language but they never stray into cartoonish vaudeville. Foster, particularly, brings layers of emotion and intrigue to a character that could have been more of a two-dimensional villain. Ritchson is more than capable for the choreographed mayhem the film requires, but holds his own in scenes with Woodley's Sophie who handily communicates how fraught life can be for someone stranded between financial hardship and the promises of drug fueled luxury. Motor City operates in a surprisingly emotional, narrative driven register for a significant portion of the film which sets the table well for the third act of propulsive, bloody action. These scenes are satisfyingly brutal and pull few punches in their execution. I do wish that Pinciroli and crew had leaned further into practical gore as that would have better fallen in line with the old-school genre pleasures of the film, but the digital effects weren't distracting. What is distracting throughout the film is a series of long-haired wigs foisted onto Ritchson during different phases of Miller's life. While the hair itself looks fine, none of these rugs convincingly belong atop Ritchson's head and it's a tremendous relief when Miller shaves his hair in preparation for his final mission of retribution.
As much as a good restriction can be a source of inspiration, films featuring this kind of rigid conceptual framework run the risk of feeling more like an exercise than they do a complete work. The question of whether the film is better or worse with the limitation set in place is a persistent one. Motor City could have potentially been a stronger crime film with more, if still sparse, dialogue but that's not really Ponciroli's project here. It's likely that Motor City only exists because of this attempt to render a film so totally focused on sound and image. It's impossible to be unaware of the structure of the film while watching, but it's equally impossible to deny the meticulousness with which this has been crafted. I don't think Motor City is destined to be a genre classic, but insofar as "jukebox" movies go, this is one of the better ones.
MOTOR CITY opens in theaters this weekend
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