Dwayne Johnson stars as Mark Kerr, a mixed martial arts fighter who struggles both in the ring and outside of it, in new film The Smashing Machine.Eric Zachanowich/VVS
The Smashing Machine
Directed by Benny Safdie
Written by Benny Safdie, based on the documentary by John Hyams
Starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt and Ryan Bader
Classification 14A; 123 minutes
Opens in theatres Oct. 3
Critic’s Pick
For the past month and a half, Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson has been engaged in a magnificently aggravating public-relations campaign in which he has tried to rewrite history that he himself carved onto the holy mountain of Hollywood.
Take this gem of a quote from early September, when a weepy, notably slimmed down Johnson made the rounds at the Venice Film Festival for the world premiere of his new film, The Smashing Machine: “I looked around a few years ago and I started to think, ‘Am I living my dream or am I living other people’s dreams?” Or how about, “A lot of times it’s harder for us − or at least for me − sometimes to know what you’re capable of when you’ve been pigeonholed.”
Okay, sure, buddy. Either Johnson is suffering from a tremendous case of amnesia after one too many head butts or he is simply and desperately hoping that audiences might forget that, for the past two decades and more, it has been Johnson − not some malevolent figures lurking in the shadows of the industry − who has been, for lack of a better term, holing his own pigeon.
The film is a loose remake of John Hyams’s 2002 documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr.Eric Zachanowich/VVS
Simply put, there is not another actor living today who has so enthusiastically made himself the universal symbol of the kind of mushy-middle blockbusters that scream easy payday sellout. No one was holding a gun to Johnson’s head when he, say, tried to remake the DC Comics franchise in his own image with the dreadful Black Adam. Nor when he pumped out a relentlessly empty-headed barrage of streaming-first slop (Red Notice, Red One, plus other movies that don’t have “red” in the title). For the actor to suddenly rebrand himself as a victim of the machine instead of its chief engineer? We can all smell what The Rock is cooking here, and there’s more than a faint whiff of bull.
Which is a shame given that Johnson can be − when he actually flexes all of his many muscles − a tremendous performer, as adventurous as he is charming. The Rundown, Southland Tales, The Other Guys, Pain & Gain and, yes, even the Fast & Furious films (especially the fifth and eighth) – they are all charged with the natural charm and committed energy of a true movie titan, someone who towers over the competition with an earned, despicably natural sense of self-confidence. And now The Smashing Machine just might earn The Rock his genuinely rightful place in Academy Awards history − if only the star could shut up for a second.
Loosely remaking and remixing John Hyams’s acclaimed but little-seen 2002 documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr, director Benny Safdie casts Johnson as the real-life mixed martial arts fighter who struggles both in the ring and outside of it. That might seem like well-trodden territory for Johnson, given his many years spent inside the trenches of World Wrestling Entertainment. Yet the star works hard to prove to Safdie, to audiences and to himself that he is capable of delivering something completely new and unfamiliar.
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While Safdie and Oscar-winning makeup artist Kazu Hiro mask their star under layers and layers of facial prosthetics (new nose shape, new hairline, new eyebrow structure, in what can only be seen as an attempt to achieve a kind of visceral verisimilitude), Johnson is unrecognizable here – not because of how he looks on the screen, but because of what he does while there.
As Kerr comes up against myriad challenges − his addiction to painkillers, his tremulous relationship with his longtime girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt), and of course his professional opponents, an intimidating roster that at one point includes his best friend, Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader) − Johnson is meticulous in his emotional and physical calibrations.
Emily Blunt stars as Kerr’s longtime girlfriend, Dawn Staples. Blunt and Johnson previously played love interests in 2021’s Jungle Cruise.VVS
Kerr, in Johnson’s meaty hands, is not a cocksure, eyebrow-wiggling facsimile of The Rock, but a ticking time bomb of vulnerabilities. As a character, Kerr is not a hero per se but a survivor − a warrior who has figured out exactly how much pain he can take, and how much he needs to dole out, in order to get by in this life. Johnson makes the man a victim who’s convinced himself and everyone else in his orbit that he’s an unstoppable champ.
It is a performance that understands, well, the superficiality of presentation − the cultivated image that you need to project to a crowd of strangers in order to win their affections while your life is on the line. And it is, of course, Johnson’s keen understanding of that divide between sympathy and pity that has made his current woe-is-me press tour so dispiriting.
At least Safdie, working solo for the first time after a string of high-strung character studies made with his brother Josh (Heaven Knows What, Good Time, Uncut Gems), understands that his movie can speak for itself. Bucking sports-biopic conventions with barely constrained ain’t-I-a-stinker glee, The Smashing Machine chronicles three short years in Kerr’s long and storied life, that small sliver of time offering a kind of impressionistic portrait of a career instead of one that might be more paint-by-numbers.
The film chronicles three years of Kerr’s life, including his addiction to painkillers and his tremulous relationship with his girlfriend.VVS
For audiences used to and expecting closed-book resolutions about romantic relationships, about professional trajectories, about the evolution of the sport, Safdie responds with a series of surprising shadow punches, practically daring you to slap some conventional sense into him. The sneaky subversion is all quickly and efficiently delivered via a cinéma vérité-esque sensibility that makes the collection of set pieces feel as if they were surreptitiously captured by a nosy but effective documentary crew.
Not that Safdie doesn’t lose a few of his own battles along the way, including the moment where he must abruptly drop Dawn from the proceedings and thus forgo Blunt’s always welcome presence. (It is more than a little deeply and darkly amusing that Johnson and his Jungle Cruise co-star have now made two films together that rely on the pair’s natural chemistry, but it is Safdie’s movie, in which the couple are frequently on the verge of either breaking up or straight up killing each other, that is the most achingly, sympathetically passionate.)
Ultimately, though, Safdie recognizes that The Smashing Machine is a single-purpose invention, one built to run on the blood, sweat and sometimes even the tears of Dwayne Johnson. Consider the act of watching the movie a double dose of cinematic benevolence: rewarding yourself, and saving the star from his own worst Hollywood instincts. Two birds, one Rock.