Review: 'The Smashing Machine' traps a strong performance by Dwayne Johnson in a surprisingly ordinary sports drama
Sometimes the people who handicap Oscar contenders care more about the narrative behind an actor’s potentially award-winning performance than what’s actually on the screen — which is why there’s maybe more hype than substance behind the talk about Dwayne Johnson’s performance in the sports drama “The Smashing Machine.”
Don’t get me wrong, Johnson gives a good performance as Mark Kerr, an early star in the fledgling sport of mixed martial arts. He shows a range of emotions, allows himself to be vulnerable, and even does something Johnson contractually does not allow in his action movies: He loses a fight.
The problem here isn’t Johnson, who goes the distance and submerges his charismatic persona behind facial prosthetics and a moody character. The problem is with writer-director Benny Safdie, who takes a conventional underdog sports story and tells it quite conventionally — which is a surprise for one half of the sibling filmmaking team who made gritty work like “Uncut Gems” and “Good Time.”
When Safdie introduces the audience to Kerr in 1997, he’s recently graduated from college wrestling and starting into mixed martial arts — which combines elements of boxing, karate and other kicking sports, and old-school wrestling, which is Kerr’s specialty. Kerr wins all of his early matches, and he describes (in voice-over) how winning is the best feeling ever.
It’s a feeling that’s difficult to share with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt). Dawn is supportive, trying to help Kerr at home by mixing his protein shakes, but she gets defensive when Kerr says she got the recipe wrong.
Their relationship is depicted as a series of arguments, where Dawn yells at Kerr until he explodes into physical violence — never hurting her physically, but terrifying her when he destroys a door or some other inanimate object — and they then kiss and make up for a while. Even when Kerr enters rehab for an opioid addiction, that pattern doesn’t change much.
The relationship Safdie depicts with more nuance is between Kerr and fellow fighter Mark Coleman, played by former MMA champ Ryan Bader. Coleman alternates between training Kerr and competing against him, notably in a brutal MMA tournament in Japan, where the grand prize (as various sports announcers say repeatedly) is $200,000, then a respectable number for winning an MMA competition. Bader shows some talent in his first acting role, depicting Coleman as the level-headed family man whose life contrasts with Kerr’s personal and professional rollercoaster ride.
Johnson works up some genuine emotion as he portrays Kerr’s rapid professional rise and, more particularly, his stumbles in the ring and out of it. I wonder about the prosthetics to make Johnson look more like Kerr, because (as the obligatory photos of the real Kerr play over the closing credits) I think Kerr at that age looked more like Johnson than Johnson does here. Maybe Johnson decided that wearing them helped him get into character, without carrying the persona of The Rock into the ring.
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‘The Smashing Machine’
★★★
Opens Friday, October 3, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for language and some drug abuse. Running time: 123 minutes.