The Smashing Machine

 

"I don't have time to sit on the sidelines for three weeks to heal."

Alert, motivational, and familiar, The Smashing Machine features two knockout performances from Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt, and tries to wrestle with some weighty emotional themes, but ends up pulling its punches and avoiding dealing too many heavy blows in a sturdy, albeit conventional sports biopic. 

Discussion Points:

Shot in 16mm handheld, Benny Safdie’s solo directorial debut lovingly evokes the period sports documentary which it shares its name with. It’s a deeply reverential and tributary approach to the early years of the sport of MMA and its obvious how much care Safdie has taken to be authentic and faithful to recreating the early years of the UFC/Pride tournaments. Real life fighters Ryan Bader and Oleksander Usyk give great performances as early pioneers in the sport Mark Coleman and Igor Vovchanchyn respectively, and Bas Rutten gets to play himself which is a frequent highlight. But the centre of attention is firmly on Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson - and boy is he cooking! Easily his most emotionally complex and dramatically rewarding performance to date. It’s engrossing watching Johnson inhabit both Kerr’s outer determination and inner demons (and the transformative makeup prosthetics help as well). And it’s explosive seeing him come to blows with an incredible Emily Blunt as his steadily unraveling girlfriend, Dawn. The film is at its best during its fights - both in the ring and outside of it. Seeing obsessive narcissists try and out selfish each other is emotionally wrought, but it’s inspiring to see Kerr’s journey of self-betterment, emotional maturity and acceptance of his own limits, and to learn how he continued to strive for sobriety and stability and satisfaction in both his wins and loses. Whilst it follows a fairly standard sports biopic approach, and doesn’t deviate too much from expected emotional beats, it’s still a sturdily assembled feature that packs a few emotional punches here and there.