THE SMASHING MACHINE Review: Benny Safdie and Company Deliver An Unsparing, Unconventional Sports Biopic

After more than two decades as a successful wrestler-turned-actor, Dwayne Johnson has studiously avoided any roles that could be described as “challenging” or “noncommercial,” instead relying on his bulked-up physique, outsized personality, and movie-star persona to coast to million-dollar paychecks, innumerable business opportunities, and a household brand name second-to-none. 

 

It’s always been obvious, however, that Johnson had both the potential and the desire to do — and, more importantly, be — more than just another well-paid blockbuster headliner. In the past, he’s come close to showing not just depth as an actor, but range, too (e.g., Pain & Gain, Southland Tales, Be Cool), but those big paycheck roles proved irresistible to a performer motivated primarily by commercial success and not artistic ones.

 

Until now, thanks to writer-director Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems, Good Time, Heaven Knows What), here making his solo feature debut, and The Smashing Machine, an intriguingly unconventional sports biopic centered on MMA (mixed martial arts) legend Mark Kerr. An MMA pioneer at the turn of the millennium, Kerr fought, won, and lost during an underappreciated era marked not just by its physicality, but its no-holds-barred brutality, leading to its initial rejection by promoters, television/cable networks, and a marginal, marginalized fanbase.

 

Based on the John Hyams’ 2002 HBO documentary, The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr, Safdie’s stylishly kinetic, if often downbeat, take focuses on a three-year period when Kerr, driven by a lack of support stateside, traveled abroad, fighting in Brazil and later, Japan, joining the latter country's Pride Fighting Championships, a lucrative MMA promotion that brought together the world’s better known, most experienced fighters for lucrative cash prizes. 

 

When Kerr’s not fighting and earning the “smashing machine” monicker by mercilessly grinding his hapless opponents into unrecognizable mush in the ring, he’s obsessively training for his next fight (and the next fight and …), treating the physical pain from short- and long-term injuries through easily obtainable opiates, and engaging in knock-down, drag-out clashes of the verbal kind with his emotionally volatile girlfriend, Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt).

 

Their scenes of fraught domesticity, often escalated to the brink of physical violence by Dawn’s deliberate efforts to goad Kerr into a volcanic outburst, suggests a consciously performative aspect to their relationship: they're driven by ingrained, inescapable patterns of behavior, no doubt exacerbated by their separate, but unequal, addictions (a not uncommon theme for Benny and his brother, Josh).

 

Less a standard, formulaic biopic of an athlete’s rise-and-fall and more an insightfully provocative character study of an athlete undergoing the seismic, transformative effects of losing in the ring, something the Kerr we meet in the opening moments can’t accept even as a remote possibility, ultimately recognizing the end of his fighting career and the top-down, bottom-up shift in perspective to survive “retirement” at an age when most men and women begin to enjoy the benefits of professional success. 

 

Peppered with appearances by former real-life MMA stars, including Bas Rutten as himself, and a standout supporting cast, including Blunt in an award-worthy performance as the deeply troubled Dawn, ex-MMA fighter Ryan Bader as Mark Coleman, Kerr’s closest friend and occasional rival, and the hulking Oleksandr Usyk as Igor Vovchanchyn, Kerr’s penultimate challenger for the Pride title and the virtual personification of Kerr’s demons, The Smashing Machine brings an overlooked, turbulent, pre-millennial, mixed-martial arts era into historical context. 

 

For Johnson, an ex-athlete-turned-wrestler-turned-actor, reinvention has been the norm, not the exception and in Kerr, an ex-wrestler-turned-MMA fighter, Johnson finally found a role equal to his under-used potential as an onscreen performer. While makeup and prosthetics helped Johnson closely resemble the real-life Kerr, it’s more than just mere imitation. Johnson, a performer defined by cartoonish displays of onscreen masculinity, fully embracing a role that demands Johnson not only steps into Kerr’s super-sized body, Kerr's his bruised soul, too.