Motor City (2026)

One of the biggest problems I had with Motor City was that it could have been set anywhere. Like, its main character is a factory worker and there’s a scene where the marquee of the Fox Theatre is in the background and another where there’s a bunch of concert posters for shows at the Masonic Temple posted to the wall, but these are surface level touches — you’re going to set a movie in Detroit and have one of your main characters be a waitress at a diner? Fuck outta here with your tastefully worn Detroit Tigers cap — those are coney islands, and that shit matters to me.

There’s some good action here, but the film’s gimmick — there’s a minimum of dialog — does it no favors. When nobody’s getting shot or blown up, it’s all broad, obvious cliche, the framing and acting landing in the space between historical reenactment in a true crime documentary and cutscene in a PlayStation 2 game. Women and people of color, who are already too frequently given thin roles like wife, victim, and friend who is willing to die for their white buddy’s cause, are even stock-ier when they’re agreeing to marry or go on a crusade through an exchange of significant looks.

I probably would have been into this as a direct-to-DVD feature in 2009, back when the script initially landed on the Black List, but the world and its action movies are much changed since then, and Motor City doesn’t seem to have changed much in response. It’s a genre exercise in the most disappointing sense — the genre works, but the exercise doesn’t.