As gimmicks go, cranking out a formulaic ’70s thriller with no dialogue, with set-piece scenes cut to songs from the era by David Bowie, Donna Summer, The Moody Blues, Bill Withers, Sniff-n Tears and Fleetwood Mac works for me.

Potsy Ponciroli’s “Motor City” features dialogue-free “conversations,” silent chats witnessed through windowed, closed doors, muted mumbling and sound effects — all aimed at making the viewer pay attention, invest in and figure out the story.

As Pudovkin preached with Kubrick quoting him, film is first and foremost a visual medium. Why have a character “tell” another character — and the viewer — something if you can show it? A gesture, a situation or a close-up “clue,” actions always speak louder than words.

Man mountain Alan Ritchson of TV’s “Reacher” — think The Hulk with better hair products — stars as an ex-con set-up by a rich mobster and dirty cops, all to wrest his fiance (Shailene Woodley) from his grasp and back into the arms of the porn-stached creep (Ben Foster) who sets all this in motion.

Nobody tells our hero, John, that the guys who swiped his Chevelle only to ditch it minutes later stuffed it with drugs so he’d take the fall. We see some of that unfold, and we figure it all out at the same time as John Miller. He reacts just the way you’d expect, with a fury.

The Chad St. John narrative opens in ’77 Detroit, a broke and breaking city bracing itself for the wasteland it’d become in the Reagan ’80s. A car chase is interrupted when our bloodied hero dumps a body — from a great height — onto the hood of one of the racing oversized ungainly, inefficient Yank Tanks that almost put Detroit out of business.

Our story proper takes place a year earlier, when we’re there for the night John meets the too-sexy Sophia (Woodley, in her best big screen role in ages). He pitches in when her lover (Foster) abuses her, winning her over in the process.

The bad guy? He carries a grudge. The frame-up takes so much time that it happens on the day John offers her a ring.

Hey, connecting with dirty cops (Pablo Schreiber is extra-menacing as the detective in charge) and setting a drug bust in motion is a lot of work. Only one detective (Ben McKenzie) in that corner of the department suspects the barrel of bad apples who surround him.

John’s despair turns seething. And that photograph of him and some buddies in Viet Nam is all we need to see to explain the two pals (Lionel Boyce and Amar Chadha-Patel) who figure out how to get him out.

How’s John pass on the request? Morse code tapped out through the prison visitation window.

The violence to come is explicit in the extreme, with every fight staged, choreographed, shot and edited to suspense-building perfection. The revulsion at the blood and body parts that knives and sawed-off shotguns loaded with pennies causes is extra.

The tunes tick over, with most songs played all the way to end, The set-pieces they underscore go off even if the plot twists barely merit the label, never breaking from the timeworn formula that this vengeance tale embraces.

Ritchson may fit author Lee Child’s imposing vision of Jack Reacher. But there’s little surprising that a guy this big is going to be too much for mere mortals to handle, a common flaw in thrillers of the post-Stallone gym-rat (often with steroid enhancement) era.

Towering, bulked up combat vet? I pity the villains. A more ordinary looking “hero” without “special skills” (we see bomb-making and shot-gun shell packing) is more surprising and more relatable.

But Ritchson gives fair value, Foster masterfully gets across his character’s sinister side, and his confidence — watch how the guy dances how he feels, damn the disco beat that the peasants are addicted to, on the dance floor.

Schreiber outsmokes everybody else on the set, a real plus for a strong, silent bad guy. And Woodley brings a little heart and soul to the proceedings, adding complexity and agency to a woman who might have had none without her in the role.

The thriller I’d compare “Motor City” to is “Crank,” which had just as much violence, more urgency and a whole lot more talking, cursing and frantically trying to escape an unjust fate. They share a “primal” feel in terms of the journey from A to D.

Ponsiroli’s “Old Henry” showed us his gift for taking a long-dulled film genre and grinding a new edge for it. Here, in stripping away dialogue, he’s given revenge thriller fans a gimmick that rewards you for paying closer attention — not a bad thing in an era of endless distraction.

Rating: R, graphic violence, drug abuse, nudity

Cast: Alan Ritchson, Ben Foster, Pablo Schreiber, Ben McKenzie and Shailene Woodley.

Credits: Directed by Potsy Ponciroli, scripted by Chad St. John. An IFC release.

Running time: 1:43