Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson hasn’t had the easiest time of things in the last few years. Once the most untouchable movie star in the world, Johnson has seen his box office brand value sharply decline over the last decade. The wrestler-turned-actor had once-guaranteed blockbuster projects like DC’s Black Adam, League of Super-Pets, or Disney’s Jungle Cruise all stumble, while failing to propel new franchises like Netflix’s Red Notice, Warner Bros. and Amazon’s Red One, or Sony’s video game adaptation Rampage to major success. That’s a string of missteps (and some public controversies) that have a lot of critics and fans wondering if (and how) Johnson could get a cinematic resurgence. Well, that (last?) chance has arrived with Benny Safdie’s sports-drama biopic The Smashing Machine, and Johnson seems to know it better than anyone. But like one of his old wrestling bouts, The Rock once again rises to greatness, just when you thought he was down and out on the mat.
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The Smashing Machine chronicles a key stretch of years in the life of wrestler-turned-mixed martial artist Mark Kerr (Johnson), as he leaps from doing foreign MMA tournaments to becoming one of the early breakout stars and brand ambassadors for the UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship). At first, Kerr is living his dream in the UFC, especially with his former buddy-turned-mentor Mark Coleman (real-life fighter Ryan Bader) by his side. However, as a more complicated range of fighting styles and rules comes into play, Mark finds that personal life troubles with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), and his own personal demons with addiction, are causing him to careen toward the breaking point faster than he ever thought possible. Before too long, “The Smashing Machine” finds himself being crushed by his own relentless ambition.
Rating: 4/5
| PROS | CONS |
| Awards-Worthy performances from The Leads | |
| A taught, gripping story of fall and redemption | Never rises beyond the typical format of a biopic |
The Smashing Machine Deserves Awards Recognition
Benny Safdie has excelled in building gritty dramas around morally compromised (but slyly charismatic) characters, almost always as a vehicle to help a talented lead actor shift gears. It worked for Robert Pattinson with Safdie’s film Good Time (2017); it worked even better for Adam Sandler, who had a career-redefining experience starring in Uncut Gems (2019). And, it works for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson in The Smashing Machine, as the actor is almost guaranteed to be a major contender, come awards season.
The brilliance in Safdie’s direction is that he sets the multi-layered tone of the story right from the outset: a voiceover monologue from Johnson’s Mark Kerr, giving an interview, talking about the joy of fighting, besting and hurting his opponent, and the supreme high of winning in front of a crowd. And yet, Johnson’s soft, measured, almost childlike speech cadence as Kerr is clearly juxtaposed to Safdie’s brutally intimate style of shooting the MMA sports action. Johnson looks like a frightening, hulking brute, standing over opponents and inflicting gruesome violence upon them (and eventually vice versa), with every punch and kick, elbow and knee delivered with sickening meat-packing thuds, visible cuts and blood spatter, which leave no room for romanticism about what toll fighting takes on the bodies of the fighters – especially during the wild west early days of the UFC.
That juxtaposition (Kerr’s physical violence, compared to his rigidly-controlled and measured demeanour) creates a palpable Hitchcockian tension that low-key hums throughout the movie, right from the start. By the time the focus shifts to Mark’s personal life, and his relationship with Dawn, that tension is bubbling through every seemingly mundane scene between the two: a single morningtime of Dawn halphhazardly trying to make Mark’s protein smoothie correctly (cigarette in mouth), or cater to his idiosyncratic rules and desires, feels like a tightrope walk being done without a safety net.
Blunt is every bit as good as Johnson at presenting a surface-level picture of who her character is, while also delivering a powerful performance wholly through the subtext of her facial expressions and muted reactions. Mark is a pit bull starting to go rabid, and Dawn is the undisciplined handler trying to hold on to the naive belief that she still has control of the leash.
No biopic is ever able to truly capture the full depth of its subject(s) or fully contextualize all the complicated turns that bring a person to being who they are and having the life they lead. That said, Benny Safdie’s script for the film smartly keeps the focus on the inevitable trainwreck that is Mark and Dawn’s relationship, while holding both parties accountable for its downturn. It’s not just a typical biopic (though it follows that framework to a “T”): It’s a tragic, toxic love story, and it makes for the real heart of the film.
The Smashing Machine Is A Tense Build To A Cathartic Climax
By the time the story reaches its inevitable (and obvious) crash point, Johnson and Blunt both let loose with some top-tier performance work, arguably the best of both their careers. Safdie also nails the most difficult task of any biopic: finding a way to bring it all together into some kind of culminating point. Even with its unorthodox third act and abrupt endpoint, The Smashing Machine manages to say something significant about how the fight in the ring is really just an extension of the fight inside us, and even adds a touching epilogue about what that journey has meant to the actual Mark Kerr.
Like its subject, The Smashing Machine, is the film that seems to remind Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson of the joy that is found in the humility of taking on and disappearing into a “serious acting” role, like back in the earliest days of his career, when he still felt he had something to prove. For fans, it’s good to be reminded that underneath “The Rock’s” massive persona, Dwayne Johnson is a damn fine actor. For Benny Safdie, this is another showcase of his talent as a cinematic auteur.
The Smashing Machine is now playing in theaters. It is 2 hours and 3 minutes and is rated R for language and some drug abuse.
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Image Courtesy of Ufotable
