The laws of moviedom decree, of course, that Mark will soon lose, and his well-earned sense of invincibility will shatter. The Smashing Machine bounces between Mark\u2019s home and Japan, where the Pride Fighting Championship takes place. That\u2019s where Mark, a much-celebrated champion, is taken down by an illegal but nevertheless humbling move. After the fact, the match is ruled a tie, but the stink of defeat never dissipates.<\/p>\n
The real battle, in any case, is at home. Mark\u2019s dependence on opioids for the punishing extremes he endures is becoming desperate. The Smashing Machine is based on John Hyams\u2019s 2002 documentary of the same name, and part of the nature of that film was the curiosity of Mark\u2019s extreme violence in the ring and his otherwise sweet passivity. In Safdie\u2019s film, Mark is asked in the doctor\u2019s waiting room if fighters hate each other during a bout. \u201cAbsolutely not,\u201d he replies.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
But while we don\u2019t doubt Mark\u2019s sincerity \u2014 he\u2019s as earnest as he is muscle-bound \u2014 Johnson also exudes an inner turmoil, and a struggle to keep his rage at bay while nursing mounting wounds to his ego. His body is so stiff, it\u2019s like he could snap at any moment.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the case for Mark, most of all, around his wife, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt), a former Playboy model who\u2019s shown as alternatively supportive and insensitive to Mark\u2019s situation. They feud often, sometimes immediately before a match, sometimes over how to make his shakes. When he tries to give up opioids, he takes her late-night drinking as a provocation. \u201cTreat me like a man,\u201d he tells her.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s an awkward, perhaps judgmental characterization that would be all the more glaring if it weren\u2019t for Blunt\u2019s tact as a performer. But it throws The Smashing Machine off course, especially when the movie seems to want to lean more on its other central relationship: that of Mark and his friend, trainer and sometimes competitor Mark Coleman (played by former Bellator champion Ryan Bader).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The laws of moviedom decree, of course, that Mark will soon lose, and his well-earned sense of invincibility…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":187697,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,785,85],"class_list":["post-187696","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-mma","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187696","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187696"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187696\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/187697"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}