{"id":178423,"date":"2025-09-29T20:00:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-29T20:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/178423\/"},"modified":"2025-09-29T20:00:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-29T20:00:09","slug":"the-smashing-machine-is-dwayne-the-rock-johnsons-oscar-play-theres-a-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/178423\/","title":{"rendered":"The Smashing Machine is Dwayne \u201cthe Rock\u201d Johnson\u2019s Oscar play. There\u2019s a problem."},"content":{"rendered":"

The Smashing Machine deliberately sets out to subvert the expectations of audiences settling in for a conventional sports biopic. Benny Safdie\u2019s first big-screen solo project without his brother and frequent co-director Josh (Benny also co-created the Showtime series The Curse<\/a> with Nathan Fielder) provides a glimpse into the early days of the sport now known as mixed martial arts that\u2019s neither inspirational nor bleakly tragic, neither Creed nor The Iron Claw. Rather, this is a character study of a flawed but admirably dedicated athlete, set against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving extreme sport.<\/p>\n

Above all, The Smashing Machine is a showcase for its star Dwayne Johnson, whose own history as a pro wrestler is an inextricable part of the screen persona he\u2019s created over the past decade and a half: genial action hero, reliable driver of fast-and-furious vehicles, and corny yet undefeatable dad. In choosing to play a darker, more volatile, less heroic character than any he\u2019s taken on before, Johnson reveals an intriguing new dimension of himself as an actor. It\u2019s a shame Safdie\u2019s script is at such pains to avoid sentimentality and outsize emotion that it winds up playing its cards too close to the vest, never really giving the star, or the movie, a chance to strut his stuff.<\/p>\n

The Smashing Machine is also the title of a 2002 HBO documentary directed by John Hyams, and Safdie adopts some of the visual conventions of nonfiction filmmaking to tell the true story of both films\u2019 subject, the ultimate fighting star Mark Kerr. The handheld camera (the cinematographer is Maceo Bishop) bobs and weaves around the ring, occasionally zooming in on the reaction of faces in the crowd. As we observe Mark and his opponents interacting outside the ring, in the dressing rooms and hallways of the stadiums where they fight, there\u2019s a sense of eavesdropping on encounters we weren\u2019t meant to see. In keeping with the gritty, off-kilter style of the 1970s movies the Safdies are on record<\/a> as loving<\/a>\u2014crime dramas like Dog Day Afternoon, The French Connection, and Taxi Driver\u2014The Smashing Machine eschews conventional Hollywood polish. Though Johnson is outfitted to within an inch of his life with facial prosthetics, his signature bald dome topped with a frizzy black wig, there\u2019s still a sense of naturalism in the way the camera explores his vast mountain of a body, covered in sweat, stubble, scars, and often fresh stitches and bruises from the punishment he\u2019s endured in the ring.<\/p>\n

At one tournament early in the film, the previously undefeated Mark loses a match after his opponent employs an especially brutal move that the tournament\u2019s organizers had just declared out of bounds. After Mark lodges a complaint, the loss is reclassified as a \u201cno decision\u201d result\u2014a seemingly neutral outcome that nonetheless sends the ultracompetitive athlete into a dark spiral of opioid addiction and misplaced rage. Though he never physically threatens his live-in girlfriend Dawn (a glammed-up, gum-snapping Emily Blunt), Mark, when provoked, is not above breaking a door in half with one colossal fist. When Dawn finds him unconscious on the floor of their nicely appointed home in Phoenix, he finally agrees to enter rehab. But his newfound sobriety is threatened when he returns home to a partner who, supportive though she tries to be, also tests his resolve by continuing to go out drinking with her friends.<\/p>\n

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Meanwhile, Mark\u2019s old training partner and longtime best friend Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader, a real-life MMA fighter) is emerging as a star of the sport. Mark resolves to start training in earnest with a legendary former champion (the Dutch-American mixed martial artist Bas Rutten), and a few years postrehab he\u2019s ready to reclaim his place at the top of the field. At a championship tournament in Japan, the two friends, who have never faced off in the ring, seem destined to finally find themselves in head-to-head competition.<\/p>\n

Adding to the documentary-like texture of the tournament sequences is a deep bench of real-life MMA fighters playing fictionalized versions of themselves. Safdie\u2019s predilection for casting nonactors alongside experienced screen performers\u2014a common choice in the brothers\u2019 co-directed films as well\u2014has mixed results. Rutten is memorably fierce and tender as the veteran trainer periodically racked with pain by his old fighting injuries. But Bader, though he\u2019s playing a major character whose emotional warmth and deep loyalty are crucial to the film\u2019s story, has trouble communicating more than a generic \u201cLove ya, bro\u201d affability.<\/p>\n

Safdie\u2019s insistence on decentering\u2014or is it distancing himself from?\u2014the usual points of focus in such a film leaves the audience struggling to find elements of the story to connect with. As Mark and Dawn engage in knock-down, drag-out battles over trivial disputes\u2014did she put whole or skim milk in his pre-training smoothie? Is he betraying her trust by calling up his AA sponsor to complain about her as she stands well within earshot?\u2014it\u2019s unclear whether Safdie wants us to root for their affectionate but pathological bond to endure. The fight scenes, too, are shown from such a deliberately removed point of view\u2014the camera stays mostly outside the ropes, rarely cutting to Raging Bull\u2013style close-ups of the fighters\u2019 battered faces\u2014that I found myself thinking more about the evolving rules of the sport over the period in which the movie takes place (1997\u20132000) than about who would win each individual match.<\/p>\n

The work of the Safdie brothers has always seemed to me to proceed from the principle that one of the highest aims of cinema is to successfully transfer the anxieties of a film\u2019s characters onto its audience. Good Time<\/a> and Uncut Gems<\/a> both had that exact effect on me: As the closing credits rolled, I felt jittery and a bit sick, seized by the protagonists\u2019 troubled inner state even as I puzzled over what the movies as a whole were trying to say. Benny Safdie\u2019s first solo film, to its credit, explores different psychological territory. Rather than entrapping us in Mark\u2019s roiling brain, he seems to be purposely walling us off from both the character\u2019s and the actor\u2019s interiority.<\/p>\n

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This role has been buzzed about as Johnson\u2019s shot at an Oscar nomination. It\u2019s true the academy loves radical transformation through prosthetics, and the makeup, by two-time Oscar winner Kazu Hiro (Darkest Hour<\/a>, Bombshell<\/a>, Maestro<\/a>), is exceptional. But is the casting of a famous and charismatic former wrestler as a famous and charismatic mixed martial artist really that \u201cfar from self,\u201d to use an acting-school phrase? When Johnson buries his face in his hands and sobs after Mark\u2019s first-ever defeat in the ring, it initially feels as if we might be getting a glimpse behind his seemingly impregnable exterior, a crack in the Rock. But Safdie\u2019s camera and the film\u2019s sympathies remain at arm\u2019s length, obscuring what\u2019s going on inside Mark\u2019s gigantic cranium even more effectively than his dinner-plate-sized hands. When the real-life Kerr shows up to play himself in a curiously flat final scene\u2014he even waves goodbye to the audience, in a perplexing breach of the fourth wall\u2014the viewer feels no sense of awe at how accurately Johnson has captured the real fighter\u2019s physicality or embodied his inner spirit. Rather, we\u2019re left wondering who both men really are\u2014and more significantly for this movie\u2019s awards chances and box-office potential, why we should care.<\/p>\n

Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Smashing Machine deliberately sets out to subvert the expectations of audiences settling in for a conventional sports…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":178424,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[90760,49,48,361,75,82,90759],"class_list":["post-178423","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrities","tag-biopics","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-celebrities","tag-entertainment","tag-sports","tag-the-oscars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=178423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/178423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/178424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=178423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=178423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=178423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}