If you love someone, be sure to murder someone else to prove it
dir: Potsy Ponciroli
2026
So, about a hundred years after they made the first movie with sound, and dialogue etc, being The Jazz Singer in 1927, someone decides to make a violent action movie without any dialogue.
What’s it like? It’s like watching a continuous music video clip for about 103 minutes.
That probably sounds like a lot, but that’s probably the average amount of time I spend watching rage on the ABC each weekend before falling asleep on a Friday or Saturday night…
If I tell you the film, whether it has dialogue or not, is a tale of revenge, you might quite rightly say to me “then despite the lack of dialogue it is like almost every action film that has ever been made”, and you would be right. The benefit in this instance is that we are not forced to listen to bored actors going through the motions with rote dialogue. Instead what we get is quite unsettling.
There are clips I’ve seen on social media where people take sections of classic films and edit out all the dialogue. Sometimes they do it to famous sequences with famous lines, like cutting it just before Tom Cruise is about to berate Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men, and before Jack launches into his famous moments where he derides Lieutenant Kaffee’s truth-handling abilities. It can be funny and weird to see such sequences, which usually don’t go that long, where you’re seeing their expressions just before they launch into something, and their faces afterwards as well. There’s a confusing aspect to it, and it can be frustrating, triggering to be constantly thwarted in getting the thing we expect, nay, demand.
A whole film of it is another thing entirely. I mean, what would the dialogue or a voice over really gotten us that we can’t have figured out ourselves? We understand the wanting, at least, the wanting of things, of people, of vengeance.
I am not sure if it helps or hurts that the lead character is played by Alan Ritchson, best known for playing know-everything man mountain Reacher in the series of the same name. Ritchson is known for his massive physique, not for his acting prowess, and a film without dialogue I guess relies on lots of face acting or physical presence, Mostly this results in people doing the kind of acting that used to be mocked on sketch comedy shows of people sitting on stools or staring out a window nodding portentously as a scene would end before a commercial break.
Except it goes for 100 minutes, also except when they’re actually doing stuff, like killing people, or attacking people. So there’s no talking, there’s people doing stuff, or there’s people contemplating doing stuff. Maybe you could argue it’s a slow burn build up to extreme action, but that would make it sound too interesting, too carefully constructed.
I have no doubt the main character had a first name, but for all intents and purposes it doesn’t matter what we call him. We can’t call him Reacher, because, duh, but Miller isn’t that different, and it hardly matters because, as we said, there’s no dialogue, so no one calls anyone anything.
Miller is nothing like Reacher, in that he doesn’t talk in an emotionless monotone and beat the shit out of everyone in order to achieve his goals. He’s just a regular guy (who happens to be 6 foot 4 and bristling with abs) who works at a car factory in Detroit, and is just trying to get by. We know he was a jailbird because he meets with a parole officer, who enthusiastically shakes his hand, implying Miller’s parole is over.
Happy Miller! Now he can finally propose to his waitress girlfriend Sophia (Shailene Woodley)! So things are looking up! But then his car gets stolen. So things look bad. But then he gets his car back! So things are looking up! But then he gets arrested, because whoever stole his car helpfully filled the trunk with drugs, so many drugs.
But Miller’s not a drugs kind of guy. Why would someone fill his trunk with drugs? It’s not out of love, that’s for sure. And the cops are under no illusions as to what they should do with Miller now, which is to put him away for 25 years.
Oh, well, I guess we’ll need a flashback within a flashback to tell us about Sophia’s previous boyfriend, played by the always reliable Ben Foster (who we can always reliably expect to play an absolute shitbag of a human being), who hated Miller and wants Sophia back, and made this all happen.
Wigs. There is a lot of impressive wigwork in this flick, not only on Miller / Reacher / Alan Ritchson. It’s very unconvincing. Ritchson does not look like a guy who’s ever had long hair in his life, and why would you want to with a head that looks like that? But the passage of time is best denoted with wigs, to indicate earlier times, or how much time passes in jail as he decides what his next move will be.
Miller, you see, was in Vietnam, and this being a 70s flick means he can convince some chaps he served with in the Rangers to bust him out and help him get revenge. Plausibility doesn’t have much to do with this flick, which, when you really think about it, feels like a Blaxploitation flick with a white lead (and no dialogue). That’s not to imply there’s a Curtis Mayfield soundtrack or anything similar, but it does heavily really on a soundtrack, and, in case it wasn’t enough that Detroit’s favoured son Jack White handles the soundtrack, he even appears in a scene as a piano player, and some of his songs (tellingly not White Stripes songs) predominate.
So, mostly (even though the flick was filmed in Jersey) it’s a 70s grungy white rock aesthetic. I half expected Iggy and the Stooges to appear at some point (a marquee at one stage implies The Ramones will be playing a gig soon).
How much of that matters? Not enough. It still comes down to whether Miller will get revenge on Ben Foster’s drug dealer character Reynolds, and get his lady back.
I kinda feel bad for Shailene Woodley. She doesn’t have much to do other than be dragged around by various men, fall out of a gold lamé dress a few times, and then… An object of desire, literally, with no say over her own fate, a toy two boys tear at until it is ripped apart..
Well I did say this was a revenge pic. That revenge is stretched out and belaboured in a manner which I found almost comical. I get that a flick has to have catharsis, but the idea being that we’re so attached to Miller’s mission that if, let’s say, it took him 30 years to complete his revenge, we’d still be totally on board with it, is hilarious to me.
If they say that the best revenge is living well, well, I wonder what the most pointless revenge would be. Holding on to a grudge for 30 years past the point where it could matter and then finally enacting the coup de grace? We don’t know what Miller managed to do in the interim, considering that he would have been the most wanted criminal in Detroit history for the crimes committed on his behalf, evading justice for many decades, but I’m sure at some point he could have settled down and maybe found something more meaningful to do with his life.
There’s a bit about the engagement ring that Miller gave Sophia (and then took back) which makes me wonder whether elements of this script were lightly lifted from or inspired by the original The Crow, since that was famously set in Detroit, famously starred someone wanting revenge on the people who killed his fiancé, and famously had a sequence with an engagement ring in a shotgun. For Revenge, don’t you know.
I guess it’s a minor point, but the flick keeps bringing it up, and even engages in extreme slow motion so we don’t miss the ring as it’s flying towards its target at a crucial moment.
Those sickos expecting / wanting a John Wick like actioner are definitely going to be disappointed, because it’s not like that really, lacking extended set pieces though with the same functional approach to getting things (and people) done. Those flicks have dialogue, or at the very least juicy one-liners, but past the first flick they transcend merely being about revenge, and become about Keanu Reeves wanting to kill everyone on the planet personally.
This flick doesn’t have that kind of budget for icing extras, and Miller just really, really wants to kill one person. There is an evil cop helping Reynolds, played by Pablo Schreiber, who really seems to hate Miller too, but we never find out why he’s got a bee in his bonnet, or why he so comprehensively wanted to fuck up Miller’s life. I’m going to assume it’s sublimated desire. Swanning about in his 70s leather jacket, stroking his moustache like he’s going to tie a woman to the train tracks, why you so mad, bro? I guess we’ll never find out.
He does, thankfully, come to a very ugly end, as one would expect. It’s a cold universe out there in Detroit. God doesn’t listen to your prayers, but the Devil certainly gets back to you if you have ill intent. Alan Ritchson, cruising on the back of his Reacher fame, maybe can’t do wrong for a lot of people, but he’s hardly a charismatic Arnie like figure (yet). He’s a giant block of wood, but they’re useful too, for building things.
I don’t think it’s a great flick, and the gimmick premise didn’t add much for me, but it was kind of soothing to watch something that didn’t require me to concentrate on a stack of tedious dialogue.
It’s not something I ever thought I wanted, but now I want more flicks like this! Imagine Rom Coms that were nothing but wordless montages of couples frolicking in autumn leaves or getting brunch with their (gay or gayer) friends?
It would be cinematic perfection. Not this, though, certainly not this.
7 times revenge is the best way of getting back at someone out of 110
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“I loved her.”
- “I still do.” – that’s it, that’s the only dialogue in the whole film. Bask in its glory - Motor City
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