There are no words for the latest movie aiming to be the quintessential Detroit flick, “Motor City.” Well, almost, sort of.
The action film, which had its world premiere Aug. 30 at the Venice Film Festival and arrives Sept. 4 at the Toronto International Film Festival, has critics buzzing about its nearly complete lack of dialogue. There are five or four or three lines of hearable dialogue, depending on whom you ask.
Potsy Ponciroli, the director of “Motor City,” which will be screened at the Toronto International Film Festival.
“You’ve heard of silent movies? This is a loud movie, except that it does away with words,” opined the Wrap in its early festival review from Italy. “That leaves room for lots of quiet glowering and for a bunch of grunts, groans, thuds, thwacks, oofs, crunches, screams, explosions and assorted nasty sounds.”
Deadline called it “a dazzling demonstration of how well filmmakers and their audiences understand the vocabulary of cinema and of genre cinema in particular.” In other words, practically no words necessary.
As the home of muscle cars, Detroit knows something about speaking softly and carrying a big engine. Why use dialogue when sheer, raw muscle will do?
“Motor City” stars Alan Ritchson of Amazon Prime Video’s popular series “Jack Reacher” as an autoworker named John Miller who is targeted by a drug dealer (Ben Foster) and a crooked policeman (Pablo Schreiber). Framed and put in prison, John emerges out for revenge and ready to reunite with fiancée he was been ripped apart from, Sophia (Shailene Woodley).
The story is set in 1970s Detroit, but the Motor City is played by New Jersey (which, unlike Michigan, has a film incentives program). The entire movie contains about five lines of dialogue. But it has enough fight scenes to fill entire seasons of “Starsky & Hutch,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” “Kojak” and other ‘70s era action dramas.
In the slang of that landline era, it sounds totally off the hook.
In a statement to the Venice Film Festival, “Motor City” director Potsy Ponciroli explained that he set out to make a visual experience that is “kinetic, immersive, and designed to be felt as much as seen.”
Wrote Ponciroli: “The absence of words allowed us to lean fully into the physical language of the characters. The score, pacing, sound design and music drive the emotional and narrative momentum. The result is a high octane experience where tension builds with precision on a very sonic level.”
The score, peppered with rock classics like Fleetwood Mac’s “The Chain”, was curated by Detroit alt-rock icon Jack White, according to the Toronto festival. TIFF’s description of “Motor City” calls it “a cinematic symphony of muscle cars, gunfire, and heartbreak.”
The film is on the market for a distribution deal to bring it to multiplexes. Prospects seem good that someone will sign on the dotted line during or soon after the Toronto event.
Not surprisingly, those involved in “Motor City” hope it will be more than just an art-house experiment.
As Ritchson told Variety recently. “Obviously, it’s a huge choice to not rely on dialogue, but I want this to be commercial. I want everybody to enjoy this and it not just to be for a tiny niche audience. And I think we did it.”
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at [email protected].
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: ‘Motor City’ has barely any dialogue, but has film critics buzzing
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