Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt and Benny Safdie unveiled the latter’s first solo directorial feature, The Smashing Machine, on Monday at the Venice Film Festival. The story of legendary MMA fighter Mark Kerr received a 15 1/12-minute ovation after its world premiere screening.
Johnson, in Venice for the first time, plays Kerr in the A24 wrestling drama that centers on an icon from the no-holds-barred era of the UFC as he struggles with addiction, winning, love and friendship at the peak of his career. Blunt plays Kerr’s girlfriend, Dawn Staples, with Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten and Oleksandr Usyk rounding out the cast.
In his review, Deadline’s Damon Wise wrote that “Johnson owns the whole thing with his truly remarkable work as fighter Mark Kerr, disappearing so fully underneath Kazu Hiru’s astonishing prosthetics that the opening of the film, presented as contemporary footage from an event in Sao Paulo 1997, looks genuinely like the real thing.”
He adds that the movie — “a biopic that’s light on the bio and resistant to being a pic” — “has all the right elements, but it plays them all in a very zen and really rather abstract way, much like the ambient free-jazz score by Nala Sinephro. … The result is a film that always seems to be a step or two ahead, which can be disorientating to say the least.”
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On why he decided to tackle mixed martial arts with a story set in the 1990s, Safdie told the crowd in Venice earlier today, “At that time period, there was something so experimental about what was going on. You had all of these different martial arts forms competing against one another, and it was just such a unique sport.”
He added, “It was also such a close-knit community, where everybody knew one another and everybody loved one another, and there was such a closeness amongst them, and to have that contradiction of this fighting world, but this love between them was something that was really beautiful to me, and I wanted to explore that.”
Johnson commented on how this film quenched his longtime desire to challenge himself as an actor. “When you’re in Hollywood, it becomes about box office. And you chase the box office. And the box office in our business can be very resounding, and it could push you into a category,” he said.
“I made those movies, and I liked them. They were fun. Some were really good and did well. And some not so much. But what I did realize is that I had this burning desire, and a voice in my head that said, ‘What if there is more?’”
Produced and financed by A24, The Smashing Machine is set to hit domestic theaters October 3. Producers include David Koplan, Johnson, Hiram Garcia, Dany Garcia, Safdie and Eli Bush.
The post Dwayne Johnson A Smash In Venice As ‘The Smashing Machine’ Gets 15 1/2-Minute Ovation appeared first on Deadline.
