‘Motor City’ Review: The Best Possible Case for a Dialogue-Free Action Flick [B] TIFF

Do movies need dialogue?

It’s not a silly question. After all, film is a visual medium. And the visual existed quite a while before synchronized sound. Denis Villeneuve recently said that he “frankly hated dialogue,” insisting that a strong image was more memorable than a good line. On balance, he made that comment while discussing Dune: Part Two, one of 2024’s great visual splendors, so it may not be a broad-based judgment against verbal communication in cinema. However, there are other films, or even film genres, for which that judgment might apply. 

For example, does a revenge flick set in 1970s Detroit need dialogue to enjoy its brick shithouse-shaped protagonist kicking ass in ways that may betray the laws of physics?

That is the hyper-specific question that Motor City seeks to solve. The brick shithouse-shaped protagonist in question is John Miller (Alan Ritchson), a well-meaning man who makes the mistake of defending the honor of and falling in love with Sophia (Shailene Woodley), the girlfriend of Reynolds (Ben Foster), a shadowy drug trafficker. Furious, Reynolds teams up with police officer Savick (Pablo Schreiber) to frame John for the city’s biggest-ever cocaine bust. Forcibly separated from the woman he loves and damned to spend decades in prison, John bides his time in his hail cell until he, alongside his colleagues Youngblood (Lionel Boyce) and Singh (Amar Chadha-Patel), can exact revenge on Reynolds, Savick, and everyone standing in the way.

To be clear, director Potsy Ponciroli doesn’t altogether ditch dialogue in Motor City. The characters are clearly conversing with each other and audibly expressing themselves in rage or sorrow. However, Ponciroli either overdubs them with a smart selection of 70s pop hits, like Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day” or Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” or hides them behind closed doors and windows of offices or bedrooms, with the camera and the audience outside. When we do hear snippets, it usually denotes an emotionally intense moment, where only a shouted word would suffice in communicating its gravity. The most notable of these moments is Sophia screaming through an interrogation room’s one-way window that she hates John. 

In fact, most of the few scenes with dialogue feature Sophia in some way. It’s ironic because her character embodies the storytelling device’s biggest flaw. The lack of dialogue also means a lack of perspective into the characters’ actions and motivations. While John’s and Reynolds’s motivations are pretty straightforward — revenge — Sophia, stuck in the middle, is more opaque. At times, Sophia appears to be a willing accomplice in John’s entrapment, like when she and Reynolds party in a club and she walks around in freshly bought furs. The ambiguity is likely the point, setting up a confrontation where John realizes that the woman he loves is a fraud. However, that point contradicts her moments of anger, with the dialogue cutting back in, revealing that Reynolds manipulated her. It creates an awkward tension where we spend more time than intended second-guessing characters’ intentions instead of focusing on the action.

And yet, that pulse-pounding, obscenely vicious action isn’t diminished. It’s clear from the jump (or, rather, the toss, of a dead body with a sawed-off leg from a rooftop) that Motor City won’t be pulling a single punch. The film is at its best when it’s just reams of footage of Alan Ritchson in a glorious Don Johnson wig, handing out bruising, bloody smackdowns on his poor, wretched victims. Ponciroli clearly had a blast directing the blood-splattering action sequences, playing with shot angles and speed to achieve maximum impact. He’s especially fond of Zack Snyder-esque slow-motion shots, to show off John’s penny-filled makeshift bullets tearing a man’s face to shreds and an explosion raining beautiful sparks all over a prison parking lot. Ponciroli’s pièce de résistance is John’s elevator fight, a viciously tactile battle in a suffocating space that’s one of the most jaw-droppingly violent spectacles in recent memory.

At the center of all the bloodshed is Alan Ritchson as John Miller. Anyone familiar with his work in the Prime Video series Reacher knows that Ritchson doesn’t have to do much to be imposing by nature of his shit brickhouse frame. However, he does a great job of pushing past his physicality’s relative ease to convey an unexpectedly complex character who experiences everything from flittering love and psychological frailty. As for his body, Ritchson adds especially punishing force to every punch, kick, throw, slam, and slash to make sure we feel not just the impact on his opponent, but also his blowback. As for his antagonists, Ben Foster is a delightful asshole as Reynolds, with his sneering petulance and off-kilter mania that makes you question how someone hadn’t tried to kill him before. Shailene Woodley makes the most of her screentime as Sophia, most compelling in the exaggerated elegance of 70s glamour.

Motor City isn’t the definitive use case to mark the end of dialogue in action films. The film ultimately proves that, even with all the bone-breaking, there is value in having characters express themselves and their motivations with words. However, Potsy Ponciroli has crafted the best possible defense for filmmakers to keep trying to experiment with what we hear and don’t hear. There’s no denying that the film’s relentless brutality is entertaining. It also shows that, even in a landscape where a PG-13 film can skate by with crushing a skull, violence still has room for innovation. Still, even though it’s easy just to punch audiences into submission, we should still use our words.

Grade: B

This review is from the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival where Motor City had its world premiere. There is no U.S. distribution at this time.