In Park Chan-wook’s “No Other Choice,” which premiered Friday at the Venice Film Festival, a character who works in the paper manufacturing industry is very proud of how he won that industry’s 2019 Pulp Man of the Year award.
Well, in Venice one day later, I’m ready to suggest that the 2025 Pulp Man of the Year should be Potsy Ponciroli, director of “Motor City.” That film, which premiered on Saturday, is a hyper-adrenalized revenge thriller that isn’t satisfied with splattering blood for about an hour and 40 minutes; it also wants to see if it can do that without talking.
You’ve heard of silent movies? This is a loud movie, except that it does away with words. 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.
It shouldn’t work but it pretty much does, at least for those who are big enough pulp fans to go along with this wacky thrill ride. (For others, it’s safe to say that your mileage may vary.)
Ponciroli has put twists on genre films before: His wonderful 2021 western “Old Henry” slyly played with the Billy the Kid legend by letting the outlaw get old, placid and sick of bloodshed.
John Miller, the central character in “Motor City,” has no such qualms. Embodied by Alan Ritchson (“Reacher”) with John Cena’s musculature, Dog the Bounty Hunter’s hair and the Hulk’s jawline, he’s thrown a guy off a building, shotgunned a couple of people, clung to the hood of a speeding car and fired another blast while hurtling backwards off the hood of that car after the driver slammed on the brakes … all under garish neon lights on rain-slicked streets, and all before the opening credits.
It’s one of those dialogue-free, hyperkinetic pre-credits scenes that typically set the stage for what’s to come, but most of the time those are followed by a bit of, you know, exposition. Like, people talking to each other.
Except that in this case, every time you think somebody is about to say something, the camera will move to another room and observe the conversation through a window, or a song will come blasting on the soundtrack to drown them out, or (and this is not a hypothetical example) Jack White will show up as a loud restaurant pianist playing Christmas carols at a volume that obscures what the characters are saying.
For a while, you think this is a test to see how long the film can extend the trick. But by the half hour mark, you realize that it’s not a trick, it’s the whole damn movie, which relies on the fact that action heroes like John should mostly shut up and that viewers know the beats of these films well enough to do without non-visual exposition.
The story is pretty simple, as these often are. John gets off parole and proposes to his waitress girlfriend, Sophia (Shailene Woodley, who does say a few words). His nemesis, drug dealer Reynolds (Ben Foster in full creepy mode), frames him in a giant drug bust set up with the help of some crooked cops, to use a phrase that’s almost redundant in this movie. John goes to prison, Reynolds marries Sophia and gets her strung out. John wants payback and has some muscular and pyrotechnically inventive friends who can help him get it.
This is all happening in Detroit in 1977, which is curiously introduced with a David Bowie song from 1983, although who’s gonna nitpick music cues in a flick in which people who should have been dead an hour ago keep on kicking? (Me, that’s who.) Other top-volume music cues from Fleetwood Mac, Donna Summer, Bill Withers, Al Stewart, Sniff N the Tears (good call!) are more era-appropriate, and it’s a kick that a bloody and fiery prison-break scene ends with the orchestral flourish at the end of the Moody Blues’ “Nights in White Satin.”
Like much of the film, that breakout takes place mostly in the dark, which you might think was done so you wouldn’t see how ridiculously gruesome this all is — until the gruesomest scene of them all takes place inside a brightly-lit elevator, so never mind. But kudos to the makeup department for wrangling enough blood for a season of “The Pitt.”
In a way, the homestretch of the movie provides proof of concept, because by the time you get into the 13th or 14th hour of the final battle (or maybe the 13th or 14th minute; I may have lost track), you kind of forget all about the conceit of no dialogue. And that’s when you actually get a few lines — though before that you get some old-age makeup that makes Alan Ritchson look awful lot like Keir Dullea at the end of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” another movie that didn’t have much use for dialogue.
I mean, who the hell needs words anyway, except maybe movie reviewers?
