Putting Out a Fire With Gasoline

When I left you last, I was threatening to go to an action movie, lose myself in blood-soaked carnage and imagine Alan Ritchson delivering vengeance to AI scrappers and the talentless hacks who are flooding the market with bad books.

As a romance writer in one of the daintier subgenres, I wish I was able to tell you that the only reason I go to movies like this is because my husband and kids like them. A lot of these movies are as derivative as anything cranked out by ChatGPT. For a person interested in plot and storytelling as an artform, there usually isn’t much to stretch the mind.

What there is, is fight choreography. Also, explosions. Quick solutions to complicated problems (ie guns). And a lot of really jacked up men.

I blame my upbringing for my love of the first three. I’m what you get from unsupervised reading and television watching in the sexist 60’s and 70’s. We had Emma Peel, but she was literally named M appeal, as in appealing to men. Girls might have liked her, but she wasn’t really there for us. And she was outnumbered by James Bond and Matt Helm and a hundred John Wayne war movies and a thousand John Wayne westerns.

And Argosy magazine. My father was a regular reader of that, and no one seemed to notice that I was reading it instead of Cherry Ames nursing novels. It was full of articles about searching for bigfoot and sharpening razor blades with pyramids, and the occasional story about helpless men finding lost tribes of Amazons in the Amazon, when they weren’t being abducted by aliens.

The world was a complicated place. And long before I noticed that Sean Connery looked good in a tuxedo, I noticed that there were characters that skipped arbitration and took the shortest route from A to Z using a howitzer and some bad karate.

This is not something I advocate for real life. I am actually a heavily armed pacifist (inherited an arsenal). I really liked the recent He-man movie where he used his HR skills to talk out problems. Can’t we all just get along?

But I still have the dark desire, especially when annoyed, to sit in the dark with a large tub of popcorn, shut off my brain and watch a guy blow shit up. Jason Statham is good for that. He was a former Olympic diver. And though he is getting a bit long in the tooth for it, he often takes off his shirt.

I declare this “fun for the whole family.” The whole family rolls their eyes at me.

Alan Ritchson is still young. Also, larger than several other action stars, put together. He plays Jack Reacher on the Amazon Prime, Reacher series. My husband listens to the Reacher audio books and was quite sulky about the Tom Cruse Reacher movies. The character in the books is 6’ 5” and 250. It would take more than two Tom Cruises to equal one Jack Reacher. We’d have to use algebra to figure the conversion.

But Alan Ritchson looks the part. Last year, he was riding motorbikes with his kids and some guy decided he was making too much noise and tried to stop him using physical violence, thus demonstrating what I said earlier about the wisdom of using words instead of fists and trying to talk out problems.

There is video of the incident. It’s on par with people caught on camera trying to take selfies with buffaloes in Yellowstone Park. The buffaloes can also plead self-defense and and do not get prosecuted.

Which brings us the long way around to me watching Motor City. I like Alan Ritchson in Reacher. He does ‘stone faced and implacable’ well. And that is about all he’s required to do. He was also in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, a surprisingly fun movie where he plays a Danish commando who really likes killing people. I won’t say he’s unrecognizable in the role, since he’s really hard to hide. But it’s a different character. He’s also in a comedy called Playdate with Kevin James playing a musclebound idiot with a feral kid. He was funny in it.

I was impressed. He acts. He doesn’t really need to. The kind of movies I assumed he was going to make weren’t going to require much more than tossing the match and walking away from the explosion without turning around.

That is basically how Motor City starts. We’re in the middle of the action. Fire. Explosions. Him carrying a dead body over his shoulders, stoic as he throws it off a building. Any minute now, he’ll be throwing out a dumb quip about raining men.

Instead, the opening credits tell us this is 1977 Detroit. And list a music production company. And I am puzzled but paying attention.

Flashback. He’s a working man, leaving a factory job. All action heroes are working men. Still stoic, head down. Still not talking. 70’s music in the background. 70’s cars in the foreground. 70’s costumes, surprisingly accurate (I was there and I’m picky).

And he’s still not talking. His character is too happy. This is doomed. I know he’s about to become “A man with nothing left to lose on a mission of vengeance” because that’s how these movies work.

But he’s still not talking. Neither is anyone else. Later, I read in the Wikipedia article that there are five lines of dialog. I didn’t count. A few other people get to say “Fuck,” for good reason, but he doesn’t speak until the last line of the movie. The story is carried by the music, by clever cuts and closed doors. By eye contract and subtle movements. It balances on the edge of suspended disbelief as you wait for the words that aren’t coming.

Things also blow up. People are shot, stabbed and mangled. Good people suffer. Bad people almost triumph before the hero gets his revenge. There is a crooked cop that looks like Serpico, because it is so very gritty and 70’s. But, unlike other action movies, everybody acts. Even the big guy at the center, who isn’t going to let his career slide into a rut.

I can recommend this one, even to people who don’t like action. It was a very pleasant surprise.