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Graphic by TheStatehouseFile.com.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe Smashing Machine\u201d is a series of glancing blows.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson gives the best performance of his career as MMA pioneer Mark Kerr. Yet the screenplay is unfocused, with none of its punches landing flush to earn the crowd\u2019s roar of approval.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The biopic follows Kerr\u2019s life from 1996 to 2000, while competing in the Pride Fighting Championships in Japan and the UFC in the states. The guy was a monster, a national collegiate wrestling champion who bulked up to 255 pounds of fast-twitch muscle to complement his \u201cground and pound\u201d style of fighting\u2014hence the nickname \u201cThe Smashing Machine.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Scott McDaniel, assistant professor of journalism at Franklin College.<\/p>\n
Photo provided: https:\/\/franklincollege.edu\/academics\/majors\/multimedia-journalism-franklin-college\/scott-mcdaniel\/<\/p>\n
The early days of MMA are fascinating for a lot of reasons\u2014then-Sen. John McCain called it \u201chuman cockfighting\u201d\u2014and we get a glimpse of this in this biopic. Still, the film is held back by offering too many fleeting glimpses. A lot of stuff happened to Kerr in those years. It was captured in a 2002 HBO documentary of the same title, yet director Benny Safdie (\u201cUncut Gems\u201d) fails to show us why any of it demands a feature film.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Straining to avoid sports cliches and be something original, the film never knuckles down on anything enough to make it so.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Which is too bad because The Rock has elevated himself beyond the expected role of big, witty hero. Johnson disappears into the character, channeling Kerr’s mannerisms and voice, showing more range than ever before. The easier part might\u2019ve been putting on 30 pounds of muscle for the role.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Like Johnson, Emily Blunt\u2019s performance is stellar as Kerr\u2019s then-girlfriend, Dawn Staples. However, when their troubled relationship takes center stage, it repeatedly feels surface level\u2014you\u2019re not nice to me, I\u2019m not happy\u2014and never gets in the nitty gritty of their complicated relationship. No fault of the cast, the script just throws a lot of arcs out there and never bothers to truly dig into any of them.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The film\u2019s exploration of Kerr\u2019s drug addiction feels superficial as well. It\u2019s an important part of his story, but we don\u2019t see his internal struggles with it, coming to terms with it in rehab, or the lingering pull back toward it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The fights suffer the same fate. The atmosphere of the venues feels authentic until the fighters meet in the cage. At no point does the film capture the emotions of standing across the cage from a trained assassin who wants to destroy you.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I wonder if it\u2019d help to speed up the fight scenes, just a smidge, to better capture the realism and mirror the raw explosiveness of a former D1 wrestling champion shooting in for a takedown. Johnson\u2019s fights especially feel overly clunky and slow until the action is on the ground and Hulk is free to smash.<\/p>\n
The film hasn\u2019t lived up to the hype at the box office, but Johnson justly feels good about the work he put in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIn our storytelling world, you can\u2019t control box office results\u2014but what I realized you can control is your performance, and your commitment to completely disappear and go elsewhere. And I will always run to that opportunity,\u201d he said on his Instagram.<\/p>\n
Johnson transforms into Kerr with startling conviction\u2014if only the film around him didn\u2019t pull its punches.\u00a0<\/p>\n
3\/5<\/p>\n
Scott McDaniel is a department chair and assistant professor of journalism at Franklin College. He lives in Bargersville with his wife and three kids.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Graphic by TheStatehouseFile.com. \u201cThe Smashing Machine\u201d is a series of glancing blows.\u00a0 Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson gives the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":210826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,57488,44427,641,102574,57489,638,16269,82],"class_list":["post-210825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-dwayne-the-rock-johnson","tag-emily-blunt","tag-fighting","tag-franklin-college","tag-mark-kerr","tag-mma","tag-movie-review","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210825","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=210825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/210825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/210826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=210825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=210825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=210825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}