Motor City

Twenty lines of dialogue. In a hundred-minute movie. I counted, or close enough to counting that I'm willing to die on the hill.

I walked in ready to love this thing. Alan Ritchson doing a 70s Detroit revenge picture? Sign me up, take my money, hand me the popcorn. I'm on record as a huge fan of his action work, and the setup here is exactly the kind of pulpy meat-and-potatoes premise I show up for. Guy gets framed on a bogus drug rap so the bad guy can steal his fiancée. That's a movie. That's THE movie.

This one feels like a fuse somebody forgot to light.

And honestly, the pieces are all there. Ritchson is great. Shailene Woodley is great. Ben Foster as the guy pulling the strings and paying off dirty cops is doing exactly what you want him to do. Three talented leads, a solid revenge plot, action that lands, a story that works on paper. I have no complaints about any of that.

So what's the problem? Nobody talks. Nobody. Talks.

I'm not exaggerating for effect. I kept sitting there waiting for someone, anyone, to open their mouth and say something. A line. A sentence. A grunt with a subject and a verb. It just doesn't come. This isn't a silent film. It's not stylized in a way that earns the silence. It's a regular movie that seems to have forgotten one of the two things regular movies do.

And look, I get it, less is more, let the actors act with their faces, show don't tell, whatever. I've heard the sermon. But you've got THREE actors this good and you're not going to let them say anything to each other? What are we doing here? Why cast Ben Foster if you're going to gag him?

I'll be straight with you: I thought about leaving. Not for very long, and not seriously, but the thought crossed my mind more than once, and that's not a thought that crosses my mind often. When I'm sitting in a theater actively negotiating with myself about whether to stay, the movie has lost me in a real way.

And yet. Days later, I'm still thinking about it. Partly because I'm annoyed. Partly because there's a genuinely good movie buried inside this one, and I can see the outline of it, and it drives me a little crazy that somebody made the choice they made. Ritchson deserved a script with, you know, script in it.

Would I watch it again? No. Would I recommend it? Only to a very specific kind of person, the kind who's going to nod and go yeah, I see what they were trying to do. For everyone else, I don't know what to tell you. Come for the leads, leave hungry for a conversation.

A revenge movie should feel like a fuse burning down. This one feels like a fuse somebody forgot to light.