Motor City Review: Alan Ritchson’s Wordless Thriller Has Little To Offer

Though there's some worthwhile action when it finally happens, Motor City is mostly misuses its time, as well as its almost-no-dialogue conceit.

At what point does a conceit become a gimmick? I asked myself this question unfortunately early in Motor City, the new revenge thriller from director Potsy Ponciroli that features almost no spoken dialogue. At a time when we actively debate whether streaming movies are written to cater to people only paying half-attention, that's always going to be an interesting choice – the kind that makes critics like me perk up a bit. It forces a film into a kind of cinematic storytelling that's always available, but harder to choose when telling is so much easier than showing.

I don't think these filmmakers really understood the opportunity they had. From the jump, the avoidance of dialogue is unnatural: Motor City regularly includes scenes in which the characters would speak, and do, but all we get are their moving lips. It feels forced. To counter that requires a sense of playfulness on the movie's part, not unlike the exaggerations of a mime, inviting the audience to be in on a choice that may seem silly at times, but, in the end, is all in good fun. (John Woo's divisive Silent Night, another nearly dialogue-free action movie, did just that, which is why I went on record in its favor.) Motor City is instead quite self-serious.

Most disappointingly, "silence" is a chance to be efficient – to communicate what would take a sentence or paragraph with a single cut, camera move, or gesture – and Motor City is aggravatingly slow. It milks even the most obvious scenes with an aggressive deployment of slow-motion in what I assume is a misguided attempt to feel weighty. Paired with an absurdly long build-up to the action that is promised, and you get a mostly leaden experience that sinks too deep for the finale to lift it out.

There's Too Little Action In Motor City (And Not Enough To Replace It)

Motor City opens with a very brief, bloody look at its ending, but when it flashes back to the story proper, Alan Ritchson's John is having a pretty good day. He clocks out of his factory work and learns from his parole officer that he's officially no longer on probation. His car gets stolen, but after chasing it down an alley, he gets it back intact – and with a certain diamond ring still in the glovebox. (Not one to notice red flags, our John.) And when he pops the question to his darling Sophia (Shailene Woodley), she gladly says yes.

Then, the cops show up, and John's happiness is shattered for good. After full-on raiding his home, they find a significant amount of drugs stashed in his car, courtesy of a dirty cop (Pablo Schreiber) and a sleazebag club owner (Ben Foster). The latter, as we see in flashback, was Sophia's abusive ex, who didn't take kindly to the way his girl was wrested away from him. John gets put away for a long time, under the special attention of three prison guards in on the set-up, and his enemies take every opportunity to salt the wound. But that only makes him angrier.

Entirely too much time is spent on what I just described, which is solid setup for a revenge tale. In any movie of this kind, that's a problem. They're simple, gritty stories, meant to scratch a specific itch; if they're going to delay that, they have to deliver on something else worthwhile. Motor City is set in 1970s Detroit, but other than sporting vintage cars and hairstyles, it doesn't really try to immerse us in that milieu. The characters are fairly basic archetypes, which wouldn't be a problem if we didn't have to spend so much time with them.

The film is disappointingly light on characterization, something the lack of dialogue only exacerbates. That needn't have been the case. Everyone only really does what we expect of their type, so their actions as scripted don't reveal character so much as serve their plot function, and the performances are oddly bland. I don't know exactly how to say it other than almost no one is really doing any "silent acting." The expressiveness, both of emotion and personality, just isn't there. Truthfully, the most compelling screen presence in Motor City is Amar Chadha-Patel, who plays a smaller but memorable role as one of John's buddies and a fellow Vietnam veteran. His is the only character I could envision still working as a non-speaking role in a more conventional film.

Thankfully, when this thriller finally reaches its thrills, it does have something to offer. The firefights aren't the most compelling, but the close-quarters battling is grounded and brutal. After being asked mostly to make his angriest faces and look big, Ritchson is finally given something to do that shows why he's on the rise as an action hero. If half of the movie was filled with variations of those scenes, this would be a very different review. Alas, Motor City doesn't even manage to end on its best impulses.

Motor City releases in theaters on Friday, July 24.

Release Date July 24, 2026

Runtime 103 Minutes

Director Potsy Ponciroli

Writers Chad St. John

Producers Greg Silverman, Jon Berg, Chad St. John, Cliff Roberts, Joshua Harris