Movies get made for many reasons, and sometimes it’s to prove the star has range. You only need to see its trailer to know that “The Smashing Machine” is one such film, a vehicle par excellence for Dwayne Johnson, a.k.a. the Rock. He’s starred in plenty of movies to date, but they’ve most often been of two flavors, or combos thereof: high-voltage action films, in which he punches and zooms and often ends up saving the world, and family-friendly comedies, in which he’s some kind of big softy who must protect others.
These roles work because they play off his persona: a mountain of a man who started out as a professional wrestler, still wrestles with the W.W.E. part-time and posts his insane workout splits to Instagram on occasion. His physicality makes him a natural action star, and it provides a humorous foil for more tender roles. Couple this with a broad smile and a public image as an upstanding if somewhat vanilla guy, and you’ve got an endlessly employable actor for these kinds of roles.
“The Smashing Machine” harnesses all of these qualities. But it gives Johnson the kind of material he rarely gets: He plays Mark Kerr, the real-life mixed martial arts fighter, whose biggest struggles are mostly on the inside. The film is written and directed by Benny Safdie, who with his brother Josh is known for telling nerve-jangling tales of losers — “Uncut Gems,” “Good Time,” “Heaven Knows What” — that feel like someone rubbed their grimy thumb all over the print, then colored some bits in with neon highlighter. For his first solo project, Safdie chose to adapt John Hyams’s critically acclaimed 2002 documentary “The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr,” a low-fi portrait of the personal and professional life of an early practitioner of the sport.
Safdie sticks fairly closely to the documentary for his version, which he and his cinematographer, Maceo Bishop, shot on VHS, 16 mm and 65 mm, moving between them to evoke Kerr’s emotional state as his tightly controlled career and personal life begin to lurch out of control. The film’s basic arc is familiar: At the start, Kerr is at the top of his game, so obsessed with the high of winning — he calls it “orgasmic” — that he has never lost a fight. While Kerr had fought with Ultimate Fighting Championship in the United States, in which fighters from different disciplines get in the ring and battle it out, the story mostly focuses on his time after transitioning to the Pride Fighting Championships in Japan.
Pride is wildly popular in Japan, and Kerr dominates his competition, becoming an international star. But he’s also a substance abuser, and as he tries to kick the habit, his relationship with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt), grows more volatile. Meanwhile, his longtime friendship with fellow fighter Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), who has often served as a training partner and support to Kerr while trying to keep his own career alive, is bending under the weight of Kerr’s own troubles.
Johnson’s performance is the magnetic center of the film, and unless you’re a huge fan of watching this kind of fighting, it’s also the whole reason to watch the movie. Kerr is not a man of many words. You get the feeling that when he speaks, he’s run his words through several mental filters, making sure whatever makes it out into the world is above reproach. Even his facial features, which have been battered and rearranged through years in the ring, are composed and controlled. This is a man whose smoothie ingredients are regimented down to the precise amount of banana in the blender. He’s not about to let anyone know what’s going on in his head.
So our emotional access to Kerr comes through Johnson’s eyes, only visible when the camera pulls in close. There is something incredibly frightened and needy in there, something that keeps winning because losing is unthinkable. This is not a fighter who wins because he needs to dominate other men; his drive to win is somewhere deeper in his being.
His stature, so shredded it seems almost drawn by a cartoonist, also seems to be hiding something, and for most of the movie you can’t quite tell what. It’s a feat of Johnson’s acting that we spend a lot of the film a little nervous about what, exactly, is going on inside Kerr’s skin when he’s outside the ring. He takes a good long time showing us.
But the movie built around Johnson leaves a lot to be desired. Part of the issue is how repetitive its plot turns out to be: Kerr goes to Japan and fights, comes home, goes back, comes home, and the movie more or less goes on in that fashion, without even the peaks and valleys that often show up in sports movies to give some shape to the tale. That’s a product of its fidelity to Kerr’s real life and Hyams’s documentary. (In typical Safdie fashion, many of the performers are nonprofessional actors and professional fighters, lending an air of realism to the proceedings.) But shaping nonfiction facts into good scripted entertainment requires finding the story inside the history.
It doesn’t quite get there. “The Smashing Machine,” like many a fighter movie before it, believes its protagonists’ primary foil is the girlfriend. Blunt plays Dawn like all those other women, somewhere between a mob wife and a leftover homecoming queen, standing by her man and tearing him down all at once. She’s a great actress stranded in an annoying part, and the relationship reveals next to nothing about Kerr.
Much more interesting is the friendship between Kerr and Coleman, which would have made a fascinating focal point for the film. All the elements are there. The two had been friends for many years, fighting each other for a long time; there’s an intriguing dynamic to their relationship, and Coleman’s feelings about Kerr’s stardom are clearly complex, while their friendship is somewhat lopsided. Perhaps that would have unbalanced the performances: Bader is a professional MMA fighter, not an actor. But he’s a natural in the role. You root for him to win a fight instead of always playing second fiddle to his more famous, more ripped, more adored friend. (They’re even both named Mark!)
The film concludes by reminding us that the sport Kerr and his friends pioneered endures to this day. But there are risks and stakes for those fighters, and they’re embodied by both Kerr and Coleman, by the losers and the winners, the stars and the more ordinary guys just trying to pay for their children’s education. In that way, being a fighter might not be all that different from being a Hollywood performer.
The Smashing Machine
Rated R for drug use, profanity, domestic violence and obviously a whole lot of smashing. Running time: 2 hours 3 minutes. In theaters.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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