Motor City is a Piece of Trash!

I really wanted to love Motor City. But I came out hating it. Even my favorite Reacher Alan Ritchson as the protagonist couldn't save it for me.

I was not prepared for an action flick without words. For the first two or three minutes, when they started from the end, I thought, "Ok, I don't really need the words here, it's a good set up for what happened before the big fight. They'll probably start talking from the beginning of the story." But when it continued with mute characters, I was getting wearier and wearier. To the point when the last line of the movie was uttered, I just laughed out loud in the theater full of 5-6 people who apparently didn't do their research just like me.

The movie has exactly six lines of dialogue. Some critiques will say it's five, but the word "Hi!" uttered by two different characters, even though it's the same word, is still two lines of dialogue. By the same token, they should count the "I love you!" line uttered twice with different levels of intensity as one line and then it will be just four total lines. But does it really matter when the movie was conceived as non-verbal? To me, it didn't.

Motor City has a definite graphic novel feel to it, so the first thing I wanted to check after watching it was if it was based on a book or a graphic novel. Turns out, no.

It is an original screenplay by Chad St. John, the screenwriter behind London Has Fallen. The script became well known in Hollywood after appearing on the 2009 Black List, an annual survey of the best unproduced screenplays. It should have stayed there. It spent many years in development, being attached to various actors for the lead role at different times, including Chris Evans, Jake Gyllenhaal, Jeremy Renner, Dominic Cooper, and Gerard Butler. For the villains, high-profile actors like Gary Oldman and Adrien Brody were previously attached to play the film's primary antagonists before the roles finally went to Ben Foster and Pablo Schreiber. And director Albert Hughes (The Book of Eli) spent years trying to get the movie off the ground before it was finally directed by Potsy Ponciroli and released on July 24, 2026.

The force that kicked it into the production gear was Alan Ritchson, both the lead actor and producer of the movie. When his team sent over the project, which had famously been trapped in Hollywood "development hell" for roughly 15 years, Ritchson reportedly read it in his office in one gulp and was immediately captivated. After realizing that the script was a "masterpiece," he instantly called his agents and asked, "What did you just find me? This is incredible," aggressively pushing to champion and make the movie. He should have just dropped it.

Ritchson had enough clout to push it, with his lead role in the highly successful Amazon Prime TV show Reacher that is about to release its fourth season this August. I'm sure his reputation as an actions star helped secure the Motor City's production budget of $30 million. What a waste of money!

Set in the 1970s Detroit, Motor City is a high-paced revenge movie where the main character is framed in a drug bust for the love of his life he previously rescued from a drug dealer. It is a love-centered action flick, full of dirty cops, loyalties and betrayals, car chases and elevator fights that will overpower you with broken and torn limbs, and Tarantinoesque blood-and-gore violence. Exactly like a colorful graphic novel that came to life on the screen.

The only thing I liked about the movie was its soundtrack. I have no idea how Ritchson persuaded Jack White of White Stripes to be the executive music producer for the movie but this was the only good feature about the film. White has written the captivating main soundtrack, selected the best songs from the 1970s that carried the film for sound when the dialogue was absent, and even made a cameo appearance as a restaurant piano player in a critical scene where I had the feeling he resisted the great temptation of walking out from the movie.

I kept being distracted by how Ritchson transformed himself for the movie. His natural height is 6'3" and he bulked up for the movie even more, looking like a mountain of muscles that has a constant chafe in the thighs area. His prosthetic bad teeth and unkempt long curly hair were supposed to add to the rugged gritty look. Instead, I was wondering all the time if he was wearing a wig. Turns out, no, he just grew his own hair and beard for the movie and in the scene where he shaved them in the bathroom I felt a tremendous relief.

The most disappointing character for me was the protagonist's girlfriend and the drug dealer's former girl and future wife played by Shailene Woodley. I loved her in Divergent and know that she has a lot of depth to her acting. In Motor City, she is an almost cartoonish representation of a stereotypical drug dealer's girlfriend (at first I thought she was a prostitute) who falls in and out of love too easily. In the diner scene with her ex, she goes from intensely hating and fearing him with her eyes and brows to flirting and reuniting with him in about 30 seconds. That's not how I would have used her talent in the movie. But she at least had two of the five lines.

Overall, I disliked the movie intensely. I think it's deserving that it made only $1.7 million on its opening weekend. I am pretty sure nothing can save it at this point and it's going to be a box office flop. Again, what a waste of money!

The leading critics are split in their reviews, with some absolutely loving it while others hating it to the point of trashing it. Nothing in between it seems. The Rotten Tomatoes viewer score is 63%. I disliked the movie so much that it moved me to create a Rotten Tomatoes account to leave my own review with luke-warm 3 stars.

Here's a sampling of the negative reviews from the established critics, not amateurs like myself:

• IndieWire (Grade: C): Renowned critic David Ehrlich dismissed the movie as a "gimmicky action movie" with "nothing to say and little to look at." He argued that the non-verbal stylistic choices amounted to nothing more than a hollow crime pastiche that failed to provide any real character depth, leaving Ritchson to merely pantomime his way through generic grind-house tropes.

• Seattle Refined: This review targeted the script's poor character development. The outlet argued that the dialogue-less constraint did a massive disservice to the cast—particularly Shailene Woodley. They wrote that her character, Sophia, was a "cardboard imitation of a human woman" and a "helpless doe archetype" that felt frustratingly outdated.

• YouTube Outlets (e.g., Major Independent Reviewers): Several prominent video critics labeled the film a "total miss" and a "chore to watch." They pointed out that unlike other dialogue-light movies where a lack of speech is narratively justified (such as a physical impairment), Motor City offers no logical, in-universe explanation for why nobody speaks. They also complained that the pacing felt heavily backloaded and repetitive, utilizing over-extended music sequences just to pad out the runtime.