Review: THE SMASHING MACHINE

 by Rob DiCristino

Dwayne Johnson’s first Oscar play comes up short.

We’ll begin with a disclaimer: I don’t know the first thing about professional fighting. It’s entirely possible that Mark Kerr is a seminal, if not legendary, figure in the wrestling and mixed-martial arts communities. It’s perfectly reasonable to assume that he was foundational in establishing the Ultimate Fighting Championship as one of the premier sports entertainment brands in the world. It’s well inside the realm of possibility that fighting was synonymous with breathing for Mark during his late ‘9os prime, that his moral and spiritual world was shaped by the discipline of training and the euphoria of competition. It’s very likely that Mark’s struggles with — and subsequent recovery from — opioid addiction helped him better define his personal boundaries and achieve his professional goals. I don’t know nearly enough about the real Mark Kerr to decide whether or not Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine does justice to his life or legacy. All I know for sure after watching it is, to quote Operation Ivy, that I don’t know nothin’.

But let’s do our best to unpack The Smashing Machine anyway. We meet Mark Kerr (Dwayne Johnson, sporting a facial prosthetic straight out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer) during a dominant run of international MMA tournament championships, a streak so glorious that Kerr can’t even find the words to articulate to an interviewer what it would feel like to lose a bout. They may be the only words he can’t find, actually, as Kerr is an otherwise elegant speaker; each word is measured and empathetic — a beat-up Kerr gently defending MMA to a horrified old woman in his doctor’s waiting room may be the best acting of Johnson’s career — an unexpected contrast to his formidable size and definition. Kerr is a leathery redwood with almost comically swollen trap muscles — the weight of the world literally on his shoulders, as it were. He carries this weight with grace and poise until he suffers his first loss, leaving the ring with his tail between his legs and a painkiller prescription that will soon destabilize his life and career.

Offering precisely no help at all is Kerr’s codependent girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt, complying with what must be federal legislation dictating that she can only play love interests), whose self-centered resentments boil over after Kerr emerges successfully from rehab. Her desire to cut Kerr off from his friends and sponsors in order to assert her own power will be familiar to anyone who's been trapped in this sort of partnership, and their chaotic break-up/make-up cycle ultimately ends up drawing more oxygen in the film than anything that happens in the ring. Watching helplessly from the sidelines is Kerr’s friend and former manager Mark Coleman (real-life MMAer Ryan Bader), whose own hunt for a career resurgence may find the two old buddies facing off against each other during the final round of Japan’s PRIDE Fighting Championships, a tournament pitting the two Americans against global competitors like Igor Vovchanchyn (Oleksandr Usyk), Enson Inoue (Satoshi Ishii), and Kazuyuki Fujita (Yoko Hamamura).

Sounds like standard Inspirational Sports Movie fare, right? Not so, you basic bitch. This is an A24 joint. It’s classy. Indie. This movie wears glasses! Cinematographer Maceo Bishop’s handheld camera whips and snaps with off-centered, vérité abandon while Nala Sinephro’s ironic score jingles and jangles through the fight scenes, clear signs that Safdie gave up on his threadbare screenplay somewhere during production and tried to cover up the gaps in substance with Good Time docu-drama vibes. It’s a valiant effort, but not even Heidi Bivens’ spectacular early ‘00s costume design can distract from The Smashing Machine’s undercooked plotting, a misstep that requires reams of cringe-inducing narration from ring announcers just to make Kerr’s behavior more coherent. For a film more concerned with the agony of defeat than the spoils of victory, The Smashing Machine spends an unforgivable amount of time trying to get us excited about a tournament that — however realistically shot — it has no real interest in.

But how’s The Rock? He’s good! He acts his way through an absolutely unnecessary prosthetic and gives Kerr a genuine humanity unlike anything else in his filmography. It goes without saying that he’ll be among the leaders in Best Actor pack this awards season, and Hollywood has enough incentive to synergize its creative and commercial arms that he may even come away with some hardware. But The Smashing Machine never crafts a character worthy of his performance — nor Blunt’s, for that matter — leaving little else to help it live on once the initial festival chatter subsides. Closing on a present-day cameo from the real Mark Kerr — who, with all due respect, is distractingly shorter than Johnson — The Smashing Machine urges us to remember his contributions to MMA history, to consider the physical and psychological toll the sport takes on those competing for fame and fortune. But to what end? What are we meant to learn from Kerr’s sacrifice? Safdie doesn’t seem all that sure. Well, my friend, that makes two of us.

The Smashing Machine hits U.S. theaters on Friday, October 3rd.