Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 50th Toronto International Film Festival, and we’re re-publishing it today as part of the film’s wider release. The party truly never stops! Check out our full TIFF 2025 coverage, revisit our official curtain-raiser, and look back at the complete Vanyaland coverage archives from past TIFF editions.
There are a fair number of frustrating things about Potsy Ponciroli’s Motor City, often by design. A co-production with Third Man Records, Ponciroli’s often at the mercy of a Jack White-placed needle drop. That, after all, is the conceit: It’s a mostly dialogue-free endeavor, stripping out all the bullshit from your average faux-exploitation release to let the music and the imagery speak for itself. You better bet if they pay for the rights to “The Chain” or the Let’s Dance version of “Cat People (Putting Out Fire),” they’re gonna play all of it, which stretches some scenes to the point of absurdity. It’s surprisingly long, and White abandons his strongest impulses when they should matter the most, such as the final action sequence. The story is a patchwork assemblage of cliches, so hastily thrown together that the stitching feels rough. You’ve seen everything here a billion times before, and it’s hard to recommend it if you’re searching for narrative novelty in your cinematic diet.
Here’s what I mean. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
Miller (Alan Ritchson), an Army Ranger turned criminal turned autoworker, is busy building a new life for himself. He’s finished his probation, has a solid job, and is gearing up to propose to the love of his life, Sophia (Shailene Woodley). Everything’s nice and lovely – until he’s set up by a crooked cop (Pablo Schriber) and gets caught at home with a cocaine bust so large it makes the front page of the Free Press. Why? Well, it turns out that, back on the day when Miller met his girl, he pissed off her former boyfriend, Reynolds (Ben Foster), in the middle of their meet-cute. He’s the wrong person to glass outside a nightclub, even if it’s the right thing to do. He’s a coke kingpin right at the height of the disco era, and the powder only amplifies his power over the legal system. Miller gets set up for a quarter-century bid, and Sophia, believing her man went back on his promises to her and facing mounting bills, goes back to Reynolds. The drug lord taunts him every step of the way, and it gets to be too much. That’s when his old Army Ranger buddies decide to spring him from prison, and Miller embarks on a campaign to liberate his girl from this scumbag’s arms.
See? It’s not exactly reinventing the wheel, narratively. What Ponciroli and writer Chad St. John are doing is distilling this type of pastiche to its essential elements to craft, at its best, a remarkably fun bit of action cinema. The introductory sequence goes hard as fuck, dropping us in medias res to a moment in which Miller, under blood-red neon lights, drops a body off a building onto a pair of speeding getaway cars. One gets hit with the meat bomb, and the other spins out of control into a fire hydrant. As Miller makes his way down and over to the car, he loads up both barrels of a sawed-off shotgun with homemade ammunition (full of loose change, doing the damage buckshot can’t do as well), before the car springs to life and he jumps on the hood. After a fair bit of scrambling, the driver brakes suddenly, and Miller’s thrown off. In perfect slow-motion, he turns mid-air and lets off both barrels. Among all of the change heading towards his victim (and the screen), an engagement ring flies to the front of the blast. Stevie Ray Vaughn’s screaming guitar work carries us to the title card, and boy fucking howdy does that wake you the fuck up at a 9 a.m. screening.
The best part? That’s not even the standout action sequence. That honor goes to an absolutely brutal duel between Ritchson and Schreiber in an elevator that acts as the proper centerpiece for the finale. The less I say about it, the better, but it evokes S. Craig Zahler in just how far it goes – two men struggling over a knife and a sawed-off shotgun, slipping about on the blood spilled all over the tiled floor of the lift. Yet to harp only on how wonderfully constructed the action sequences are does a disservice to the stray bits of poetry that emerge in the hypnotic haze that strings them together.
The casting is all quite well done, but one performer stands out in particular. Surprisingly, it’s not Foster, who is always a delight to see and is perhaps the best guy at portraying a kind of slimy psychopath you can find working in action-adjacent areas. It’s Ritchson, who is perfectly cast, embodying both the vintage tough-guy crime lead (say, Aldo Ray) and the modern-day muscle man of action while rising to the challenge posed to him by the conceit. Miller’s not a stoic; his “cool” collapses the minute a tear gas canister busts through his window, and he feels deeply, at least as suggested by Ritchson’s heavy, focused eyes. Like the character, the part looks tough, but it’s only tougher when the heat gets cranked up.
So, as a Jack White Cinematic Endeavor, Motor City doesn’t quite get over the line – his choices feel just a bit obvious compared to what you’d hope for (“I Feel Love?” Really?), and the movie drags through the second act to make sure we fully hear every note. As action cinema, however, Motor City straddles the boundary between oddly poetic and bone-crunching, which is a combination I find as solid as a shot of espresso in a glass of orange juice (don’t knock it until you try it). There’s no way you could mess with the balance without reducing what makes Ponciroli’s work here so intriguing, as speeding up the languid bits would collapse the whole vibe. They’d probably need some dialogue, too, and then, well, fuck.
Turns out that bastardized version is so boring that a couch-bound dad wouldn’t even notice it in their recommended feed, no matter how much the streamer fucks with the algorithm. When he does find it, you know what he’ll say: “I’ve seen that one before, haven’t I?” Well, Pops, provided nobody messes with Motor City when it gets acquired, no, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.