Netflix reportedly wants the screenplays for their original movies to be dumbed-down for their presumed audience of doomscrollers, who are more focused on their devices than the movie they're supposedly watching, by having characters constantly restating what's going on for the attention deficient. Well, if there was ever an example of NOT doing such a anti-cinematic thing it would be Motor City, a revenge-action flick which is almost entirely devoid of dialog yet doesn't miss it much.
Alan Ritchson (Reacher) stars as John Miller, a parolee who works in a Detroit factory and lives with his waitress girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley, The Secret Life of the American Teenager). His parole officer gives him his discharge and to celebrate he proposes to her. Unfortunately, the drug lord who used to be her boyfriend uses that moment to have crooked cops bash down their door and arrest him for drugs planted in his car which had been stolen then dumped after being loaded with incrimination. Sentenced to prison, she ends up back with the crook, Reynolds (Ben Foster, Pandorum), and Miller plots his revenge.
There are only a handful of understandable dialog lines in the entire movie and none of them are important to the plot, yet director Potsy Ponciroli effectively makes what's happening clear even with flashbacks and intercuts between scenes. A few years back John Woo attempted a very similar trick with Silent Night but in that case the contrivance was annoying and unsuccessful, but here the style, performances, and needle drops make it work. While better, it's still not a great thing but I've added a point for the positively gonzo last act with spectacular fireworks and the grisliest kills.
As long as I've been a movie reviewer I've taken special umbrage at how inaccurately Detroit is portrayed my movies in a manner they would never allow to happen for NYC or LA. (Four Brothers finale with a confrontation on a lake at Thanksgiving supposedly frozen solid enough to support huge SUVs is a particularly bad example.) For a movie set in 1976-77 where they went through all the trouble to source a lot of period-appropriate cars and do the production design, costumes and hairstyles Seventies-like, the establishing shots of the city show buildings and features that weren't present until much later.
The Ally Detroit Center (formally One Detroit Center) is shown in aerial shots as well in the background of a funeral scene. Ignoring the whole "there are no cemeteries in that area" detail, the filmmakers composited a skyline including the Detroit Center which was not completed until 1993! It's not like they forgot to erase a modern building from location footage; they added something that wasn't there.
Bonus stupidity is showing people leaving the landmark Fox Theater with the modern marque that was added during restoration in 1998 and then updated in 2015 showing the Ramones headlining. The Ramones never played the Fox in 1976 or 1977 and both their Detroit-area performances were opening slots. Especially howl-worthy is the Fox being portrayed as on a narrow one-way side street when it sits on Woodward Avenue, the main artery running from the Detroit River to Pontiac, 27 miles north. Very wide. Not like they show it on a street narrower than 4th Street in Royal Oak where the Royal Oak Music Theater (where the Ramones DID play in 1976) looks.
These goofs are especially weird because Jack White is an executive producer and cameos as a piano player in one scene.
Grousing about local inaccuracies aside, Motor City is a solid watch as long as you commit to watching it on your first screen.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable/streaming.
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