If you like your action lean and mean, this one is worth circling. Motor City, starring Reacher's Alan Ritchson, hits theaters this week, and its whole pitch is right there in the runtime: 103 minutes, and reportedly only about five lines of spoken dialogue in the entire film.
The fists, the cars, and a Jack White-curated soundtrack do the talking instead. White, a Detroit native, scored the thing with needle-drops from the likes of Bill Withers, David Bowie, and Fleetwood Mac, plus an original of his own. It's Ritchson's first major theatrical action lead outside the Prime Video Reacher run, and he's not easing into it.
The setup is pure meat-and-potatoes revenge. In 1970s Detroit, working-class everyman John Miller is framed by a gangster and thrown in prison. When he gets out, he comes back for the men who took everything from him, and the movie mostly just lets him.
Ritchson leads a stacked bench: Ben Foster, Shailene Woodley, Pablo Schreiber as the villain, Ben McKenzie, and Lionel Boyce fill out the cast. Behind the camera is Potsy Ponciroli, coming off the well-liked neo-western Old Henry, with stunt coordinator Doug Coleman (The Revenant, Ford v Ferrari) running the action. Ritchson, who called the script a "masterpiece," handles much of the heavy lifting himself alongside fight choreographer Ryan Tarran, his longtime stunt double.
A Big Bet On Dialogue-Free Action
Stripping a whole film down to its stunts and its soundtrack is a real gamble, and the early word says it mostly lands. Motor City premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2025 and played Toronto right after, and it's sitting in the mid-70s on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics are split on whether the near-wordless approach is dazzling or overcooked, but the craft keeps drawing praise. Deadline, reviewing it out of Venice, called the result "dazzling."
Ponciroli has framed it as a throwback made for the big screen. "It's a love letter to Detroit, to 70s cinema, and to the kind of filmmaking you can feel," he said of the project. For an action crowd raised on wall-to-wall quips, a movie betting everything on movement and music is a real change of pace.
So the real test is at the box office: can an almost-silent revenge thriller pull an action crowd into theaters in 2026? Are you in for something this stripped-down, or do you want a little more talk with your carnage?
Let us know in the comments below!