MOTOR CITY (2025)

Hard to know where to start on this one.  Writer Chad St. John brings action experience, director Potsy Ponciroli made the promising OLD HENRY/’21, so this feels like regression, a concept-driven film-school graduation project.  Let’s start with its title: hard to see anything Detroit here.  Not filmed there, worse it looks not filmed there.  Supposedly set in the '70s, post ‘67 race-riots, we might be in any Rust Belt town, not a majority Black city just hanging on to a million residents.  The generic look matching its generic storyline: mob moll Shailene Woodley falls between new XXXL lover boy Alan Ritchson (the actor who saved REACHER from pint-size Tom Cruise) and local heroin franchiser Ben Foster.  But when he’s framed out of the picture by Foster with a historically large drug bust that makes the police look good, Ritchson winds up in the clink where he’s soon plotting escape & revenge.  Eventually killing his way out with a pair of prison accomplices with blood, car chases & mayhem.  Standard action fare; though a penultimate fight in the confines of a moving elevator is vicious enough to match violent French provocateur Gaspar Noé in unintentional laughs.  And now, since we can’t avoid it any longer, we need to mention that high-concept . . . er, gimmick . . . er, mere gimmick;  St. John & Ponciroli give everything in here the silent treatment.  That is the Silent Film treatment.  Or think so.  What they actually do is go about 92% inaudible dialogue.   ‘Silent films’ actually had plenty of dialogue, just no way to record it.  Reading lips becoming something of a game for audiences.  (Is Victor McLaglen swearing?*)  Here, the dialogue is muffled behind glass or obscured by distance.  You might as well hire a mime to do complicated exposition.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID:  *One of the biggest laughs Buster Keaton ever got came thru lip reading.  Right at the end of THE BOAT/’21, his richly comic/existential short, when lost at sea with his family in a sinking boat somewhere between sand & sea, he’s asked by rescuers for his location and, speaking in medium close-up, ‘mouths’ the name of his vessel.  This punchline entirely dependant on the audience reading his lips.  Damned if they don’t!