MOTOR CITY

Here is the decision, and it is not a close one. MOTOR CITY is a genuinely stylish movie — a 1970s Detroit revenge picture told with five lines of dialogue and a wall of classic pop music — and for long stretches it is fun to watch. Three stars is an honest rating for what the craft pulls off.
The content settles it. Five "f" words in a movie that barely speaks. Very strong bloody violence, including a brutal knife fight in an elevator and a closeup of a leg shot to pieces. A woman shown topless in two scenes. A fantasy sequence of sexual foreplay, and an implied rape. Cocaine, and frequent drinking throughout.
Underneath all of it runs a revenge-driven pagan worldview: a man wronged, a woman between two men, and a score to be settled by hand. Two Christmas lyrics naming Jesus drift through the soundtrack, and they are not enough to change what this movie is about.
So: skip it. The style here is real. It never earns what it costs.

Detroit, the 1970s. John Miller (Alan Ritchson) is a factory worker just off parole for an old offense, and he has bought a ring for Sylvia (Shailene Woodley), the waitress he loves. He proposes.
Before the moment can settle, tear gas comes through the windows. John is arrested in a drug bust that was staged around him, and the sentence is twenty-five years.
Inside, he learns who really set him up — and what that man has taken from him since. The movie says the rest almost entirely without dialogue.

Three stars, and here is what they buy. The gimmick works. Telling a whole story with five lines of dialogue and a stack of 1970s pop records is unusual enough that it makes riveting viewing for action fans, and director Potsy Ponciroli and writer Chad St. John have found a fresh way into a time-worn genre — plenty of flash, almost no subtlety.
What they have not made is a deep film, and they are not trying to. The plot is paper-thin, the characters are one-dimensional, and the whole thing plays like a 103-minute music video. Expect a fast ride, not complexity.
The leads sell their broad types well. Ritchson makes a sympathetic, burly hero; Ben Foster twirls his mustache as his nemesis; Shailene Woodley is the alluring woman caught between them. Call it a comic book for adults.

MOTOR CITY believes in getting even. A man is framed, a man is imprisoned, and everything after that is the settling of the account. The worldview underneath is pagan and revenge-driven — mixed rather than pure, but revenge is the fuel in the tank.
The wrong done to John is real, and the film wants you to feel it. That is the seduction of a revenge picture: it hands you a genuine injustice and then invites you to enjoy what a man does with it.
The women fare worse than the men. A woman carries on affairs with two different men — including the gangster at the center of the story — and the movie records it without a flicker of conscience, hers or its own. The fight the men are having is partly a fight over her.
There is one countercurrent, and it is fainter than the film seems to notice. Christmas turns up here and there, and two song lyrics carry more weight than anything in the script: "The birthday of Jesus is here" and "Tell all the world Jesus is King." A story about a man taking justice into his own hands plays, on its own soundtrack, the announcement that Someone else already holds it.
That is a mitigation. It is not a redemption, and the movie never treats it as one. The ache MOTOR CITY runs on — that the account should be settled, that the guilty should pay — is not wrong. It is simply not ours to collect: "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord" (Romans 12:19).

There is real craft here — a movie that dares to tell its story in music instead of words and mostly pulls it off. There is also bloody violence, topless nudity, an implied rape, cocaine, and a revenge story with nothing above it. Style does not cover that much. Our answer stands: skip it. For something worth your evening instead, start with our family-friendly picks.