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Review by James Lindorf
In 2009, Chad St. John’s screenplay for “Motor City” landed on the Black List, the annual collection of the most liked unproduced scripts in Hollywood. What followed was fifteen years of development cycles that cycled through Chris Evans, Jake Gyllenhaal, Gerard Butler, Dominic Cooper, and director Albert Hughes before finally landing with director Potsy Ponciroli and a cast led by Alan Ritchson. The finished film finally arrives in theaters everywhere on July 24th and answers the question of whether it was worth the wait with a resounding maybe.
John Miller (Alan Ritchson) is a working-class Detroit romantic framed by ruthless gangster Reynolds (Ben Foster) after stealing his girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley). With John sent to prison for decades, Sophia returns to Reynolds as planned. What he did not account for was John’s devolution. When John learns how the drug runner is treating Sophia, no prison can hold him as he sets out to get the girl and his revenge. Over the course of 103 minutes, “Motor City” contains approximately five lines of dialogue. Everything else, the character development, the emotional beats, the story logic, is communicated through physical performance, period detail, and a carefully chosen soundtrack that the marketing describes as a thunderous rock score. “Nights in White Satin” and “Lovely Day” are many things, but thunderous rock is not among them. They are thematic and often brilliantly chosen, which is a more honest and ultimately more interesting description.
The closest comparison is watching a silent film, or as it applies to Ritchson specifically, watching “Reacher” on mute. He is good in the relationship scenes and capable in the action, if occasionally stiff in his movements like he needs a little more time with a yogi and less with the weights. Ritchson unfortunately spends a significant portion of the film under bad wigs and outrageous aging makeup that distract from a performer who is asked to carry nearly every scene without words to lean on.
The montage of John and Sophia falling in love is genuinely cute. We watch her transform from a drugged-out party girl into someone comfortable and happy whether going out or staying in and being silly with John. Woodley has always been a talented actress, so it is no surprise that she is believable throughout. Her bombshell moments in a fantastic gold dress or over-the-top fur coat are striking. Her fashion and passion set these two men on a collision course and serves as a reminder that the bullying she suffered around “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” in 2014 was completely unfounded.
Continuing the trend of good performances is Foster, who is fantastic as Reynolds. He brings a complexity to the villain that is a mix of petty and sniveling while being genuinely dangerous. He is the kind of bad guy who mostly throws subordinates at the problem rather than getting his hands dirty, but he will pick up a gun when he needs to. “Motor City” features a prolonged fight in a car that is not just his crowning moment but one of the more inventive action sequences in the film. Pablo Schreiber is the most memorable of the supporting cast as a crooked cop and primary henchman, though like everyone outside the central triangle he is defined entirely by what you can intuit from his physical presence rather than anything the script tells you directly.
That is both the film’s defining choice and its central limitation. Who are John’s friends and how did they acquire their particular set of skills? Why does a factory worker know Morse code and how to fashion a weapon from melted candy? The only answer is that the script wants it that way and so it shall be. This was either a brave commitment to a distinctive vision or a convenient excuse for not doing the harder work of building a world. The most purely cinematic sequence in the film makes the strongest case for the former. A fight staged to “Ring Christmas Bells,” the Ray Conniff arrangement of “Carol of the Bells,” plays like a grindhouse version of the “Die Hard” school of Christmas violence, brutal and oddly beautiful and unlike almost anything else you will see this summer. That grindhouse feel continues in a scene that involves a man doing donuts in a prison yard with gasoline tanks strapped to the back of his car spewing their contents for a fiery escape. It is the kind of image that belongs in a Death Race sequel but still somehow works here.
The 1970s Detroit setting feels period appropriate in terms of cars, clothes, and hair without the city or the era being essential to anything that happens. The same story could unfold in any American city across several decades with minimal changes. Ponciroli shows genuine style and confidence throughout the production. He is a filmmaker who knows what he is making and commits to it fully even when the material beneath the presentation is relatively thin. The development history suggests this film probably would have gotten made sooner with a less prominent cast. However, in Catch-22 fashion, without recognizable names attached, there would be less interest in a nearly dialogue-free period revenge film, and less chance of recovering its costs.
“Motor City” is for fans of artistic or grindhouse filmmaking who want their revenge films delivered any way they can get them. The average viewer who picks it up based on the cast alone may not make it past the first fifteen minutes. Those who stay will find an easy and occasionally exhilarating watch that earns its audacity even if the story does not. For sheer artistic charisma and the commitment of its cast, “Motor City” comes in at a 2.5 out of 5.
Genre: Action, Mystery & Thriller, Crime, Drama
Rating: R (Some Grisly Images|Drug Content|Sexuality/Nudity|Language|Strong Bloody Violence)
Release Date (Wide Theatrical): July 24th, 2026
Runtime: 1h 43m
Director: Potsy Ponciroli
Screenwriter: Chad St. John
Producer: Jon Berg, Cliff Roberts, Greg Silverman, Joshua Harris
Distributor: Independent Film Company
Production Co: Peachtree Media Partners, Stampede Ventures, Gramercy Park Media, Black Bear
