For better and for worse, “The Smashing Machine” gives The Rock his Oscar vehicle
Directed by Benny Safdie
Written by Benny Safdie
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten, and Oleksandr Usyk
The Smashing Machine is predicated on the contrast between the Dwayne Johnson (Red One) you thought you knew and the one on the screen before you. The former is best conceptualized as “The Rock,” the star of ego-driven blockbusters where he plays a jacked, no-nonsense hero who’s definitely taller than everyone around him, is contractually forbidden from losing a fight, and stands as the gravitational singularity around which entire universes revolve. He makes, in short, bad movies, and people were starting to catch on. A string of live-action box office bombs—Jungle Cruise, Black Adam, Red One, to say nothing of the collapse of the Fast & Furious franchise—have forced the Rock to reveal a new form: Dwayne Johnson the Actor, a bespectacled thespian who has been nested inside him all along like a matryoshka doll. If The Rock can’t be the biggest movie star in the world any more, then Dwayne Johnson will just have to emerge and prove himself the best actor in the world, and The Smashing Machine is where he’ll do it.
If you can’t tell, I am a card-carrying Rock hater; I found his schtick embarrassing even before he admitted to pissing in bottles, so it is with great regret that I must now say that the parts of The Smashing Machine that work do so because Johnson is quite good in it as wrestler Mark Kerr. He serves as the anchor for the entire project, not just artistically but spiritually. In the same way that the film has been constructed from the ground up to draw a comparison between Johnson’s past and present, it also gets a lot of mileage out of the contrast between Kerr’s physical size—accented by Maceo Bishop’s (The Curse) pseudo-documentarian cinematography, shot partially on film and heavy on close-ups of the biggest skull you’ve ever seen—and his personality. At times, he shows moments of real tenderness as he takes simple pleasure in watching the Sun rise over the Pacific Ocean or signs an autograph for a shy child in a waiting room. Elsewhere, he becomes a manchild, a controlling, tightly wound figure in the lives of the people around him, especially his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt, The Fall Guy). Johnson manages these different facets ably and melds them into a believable single character in a transformative performance aided by some truly impressive make-up. The story’s lax pacing may mark it as an A24 sports film, but it also gives its lead space to fully embody his most demanding role.
The Octagon where Kerr made his mark on the UFC world plays a secondary role in the story even as it stays at the forefront of Kerr’s mind, but when director Benny Safdie (one half of the Safdie Brothers, Uncut Gems, making his solo debut here) brings us into the arena, it certainly doesn’t lack for impact. His sound design emphasizes the violence of a fight without overindulging on gore, heavy on the dull thump of flesh meeting flesh meeting hard mat. Experimental musician Nala Sinephro’s percussive score, meanwhile, accentuates the fevered atmosphere of split second decisions and brutality that drive a fight. They’re tense and memorable while maintaining a novel feel.
For its first half, The Smashing Machine is carried by these things: the contrasts between the new and old Johnson, the exterior and interior lives of Kerr, life in and out of the Octagon. However, because it has been so thoroughly built as an Oscar vehicle for Johnson, the cracks begin to show and then quickly expand once the camera is pointed elsewhere. Nowhere is this more apparent than Blunt’s Dawn, painted as the victim of Kerr’s emotional abuse in the movie’s initial scenes, forced to withdraw within herself by Kerr’s tantrums and painkiller addiction when she’s not being made to literally coddle him. The movie isn’t shy about painting him as a child through intentional aspects of Johnson’s performance and the writing itself giving him lines about his “tummy.” A highlight of the entire film finds Dawn escaping Kerr’s influence briefly for a joyful ride on a Gravitron.
However, come the second half, Dawn’s characterization suddenly changes. She becomes an irresponsible shrew unsupportive of her partner’s newfound sobriety, ungrateful for all that he’s given her, and incapable of taking care of herself. The generous read for this derailment is a misalignment of perspective. We’ve been completely grounded in Kerr’s point of view while getting nothing of hers, so character traits that have always been there seem to come out of nowhere. The movie is so laser-focused on its star and his Oscar chances that it forgot it had other characters, even when they were important to the movement of the plot. The less generous read is that of a film more clearly than any I’ve seen in quite some time asking its audience, “What a bitch, right?”
It extends to other characters, as well. Mark Coleman (MMA fighter Ryan Bader in his acting debut), Kerr’s best friend and fellow fighter, shares in the emotional climax yet receives almost no characterization beyond scenes where he states all-but-directly to the camera that he is indeed Mark’s best friend. When it comes time to sit with his emotions as Safdie so clearly wants us to, it’s a hard ask because he’s barely been a featured player. There is an element of intentional anticlimax to the way things end here—we are meant to be denied the typical satisfaction of the sports movie—but there’s also a deeply unintentional one borne of a story that begged for more than a single perspective. Disappointingly, but perhaps not unexpectedly, The Smashing Machine is a Rock film after all. A smarter one, certainly. A more thoughtful one, mostly. But still designed to make its star look as good as possible, to ferry his career to the next point even at the detriment of the movie itself.
Rating: B-
The Smashing Machine will be released in theaters on October 3. You can watch the trailer here.
