Producers: Greg Silverman, Jon Berg, Cliff Roberts, Chad St. John, Alan Ritchson and Joshua Harris   Director: Potsy Ponciroli   Screenplay: Chad St. John   Cast: Alan Ritchson, Shailene Woodley, Ben Foster, Pablo Schreiber, Lionel Boyce, Amar Chadha-Patel, Ben McKenzie, Dominic Bogart, Mister Fitzgerald and Rafael Cebrián   Distributor: IFC

Grade: C-

When Macbeth speaks of a tale “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing,” he might have been pointing a finger at this movie, a thoroughly vacuous distillation of B-movie grindhouse tropes with a plot so thin it can be written on a small-sized napkin.  But it wouldn’t be accurate to include Shakespeare’s phrase that it’s a tale “told by an idiot,” because scripter Chad St. John and director Potsy Ponciroli know what they’re up to and have enlisted a cast and crew—production designer Mayne Burke, costumer Amy Roth, cinematographer John Matysiak and editor Joe Galdo—crafty enough to pull off their peculiar vision.

That vision makes the picture a stunt in two ways.  First, it’s mostly dialogue-free.  Not that it’s soundless.  There are a few words spoken, and lots of grunts, groans and other noises during the numerous action scenes. (The sound design is by David Tirolo.) And the music is virtually non-stop.  Most of the first two-thirds on the soundtrack are needle drops of pop songs (supposedly selected by Jack White, who also has a cameo tinkling the keyboard), but in the latter stages they’re replaced by Steve Jablonsky’s moody, explosive synthesizer score.

Then there are the visuals.  Every frame of the movie looks artificial, as though each sequence represented a sequence of panels from a graphic novel brought to life, frequently in slow-motion.  (Think of it as a second cousin to Robert Rodriguez’s “Sin City.”)  Presumably the look is the result of collaboration between Ponciroli, Maltysiak and the visual effects team headed by Bernie Kimbacher, but when combined with the almost-no-words gimmick it makes for a real oddity.

As to the narrative, it begins in 1977 Detroit with a prologue in which ultra-beefy hero John Miller (Alan Ritchson) tosses the corpse of scurvy police detective Savick (Pablo Schreiber) off the roof of an office building into the street below.   He then descends to the pavement to confront drug kingpin Reynolds (Ben Foster), who’s speeding down the street in his muscle car.  Their battle, which ends with John’s firing bullets, as well as an engagement ring that reappears throughout the movie, through the windshield, will be repeated at the film’s close, though it will be followed by a ludicrous epilogue.

Then we see the reason behind the mayhem.  John, a Vietnam vet and ex-con, has humiliated the brutal Reynolds by stealing his girlfriend, a floozy named Sophia (Shailene Woodley), who under his benign influence transforms herself into a good girl waitress.    

But at the very moment John is presenting that ring to the overjoyed Sophia, a tear gas cannister crashes through the window of their house, followed by a SWAT team that arrests Miller for transporting drugs.  Reynolds, in connivance with Savick, has framed him, and soon takes his absence as an invitation to woo back the suspiciously changeable Sophia, who becomes his overdressed trophy squeeze.  He also takes the opportunity to come to the police station to taunt John, who’s soon ensconced in a brutal prison under a twenty-five-year sentence.

But his old war buddies Youngblood (Lionel Boyce) and Singh (Amar Chadha-Patel), who come out of nowhere, help him arrange an escape—a totally absurd affair that nonetheless allows for what one assumes is a cheeky joke when the prison’s name is revealed as Brubaker years before that reform-minded Robert Redford movie will come out.  (Less amusing is the decision to name Savick’s three corrupt confederates, played by Dominic Bogart, Mister Fitzgerald and Rafael Cebrián, Porthos, Aramis and Athos.)

An attempt to rescue Sophia, now tired of Reynold’s cruelty, from his mansion has a tragic result, leading to a hyper-violent confrontation between John, Youngblood and Singh on the one hand, and Savick and his thugs on the other.  That leads to the repetition of the prologue and the idiotic epilogue, marred by some terrible makeup and a few lines of dialogue bad enough to make you glad that the movie was mostly word-free until then.

That simple frame-up and revenge tale is interrupted by a single subplot involving Kent (Ben McKenzie), a straight-arrow cop who challenges Savick’s case against John.  The thread adds nothing meaningful to the script, telling us nothing we didn’t already know, and is the occasion for the most irritating of all the needle drops, a portion of the “Lacrimosa” from Mozart’s Requiem, which has become one of cinema’s worst musical clichés.  Filmmakers, please stop using Wolfgang’s beautiful piece for your shorthand.

“Motor City” has drive to spare, but little beneath the hood except the incessant musical racket.  The characters are comic-book sketches, led by Ritchson’s Miller, whose two expressions are smiles during the rare happy moments, and a grim determination everywhere else; he’s a modern-day Dolph Lundgren.  Woodley sports some glitzy duds thanks to Roth, but her role is merely decorative too.  Savick makes a sleazy villain and the lesser supporting players get by, but only Foster really gets into the over-the-top swing of things; subtlety has never been the prime element in the actor’s toolbox, but here he makes no pretense of it, giving a turn so outrageously operatic that it gives opera a bad name.  (Watch for his hilarious dance scene.)

The wordless gimmick inevitably brings comparisons to John Woo’s 2023 “Silent Night,” but that movie had a narrative excuse for the lack of dialogue—the protagonist has lost his voice to a bullet to the throat—and Woo, no doubt recognizing the banality of any dialogue that would fill such a vigilante revenge tale, obviously relished the chance to concentrate exclusively on his métier, the choreography of violent action, which he delivered in spades.   His exercise goes on too long, becoming increasingly dotty in the process, but its “realistic” visuals have punch, and he intersperses them with flashbacks that lend the plot some emotional heft.  What prompted Ponciroli to adopt his approach is unclear, but the result has none of Woo’s imaginative zest or his reach for human feeling.  “Motor City” is just garish cinematic wheel-spinning.