Stream It Or Skip It?

The Smashing Machine (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video) sure seems engineered to generate Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson some Oscar buzz. Of course, we know him as the big-paycheck headliner of many glossy mainstream movies, but this gritty biopic of pioneering mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter Mark Kerr shoots down questions about whether or not he can be a “serious actor.” Writer/director Benny Safdie – working without his brother Josh Safdie for the first time – used the 2002 documentary of the same title as a springboard for a sports drama about a man who struggled with drug addiction and tumultuous relationships (Emily Blunt plays Kerr’s longtime girlfriend) while helping establish a sport that has since become a multibillion-dollar phenomenon. The Safdie name comes saddled with expectations – the brothers helmed two heavy-duty thrillers, Good Time and Uncut Gems, both destined to be among the era’s defining films – so we’re here now to determine if the filmmaker and his megawatt star can, well, knock us out.

The Gist: Brazil, 1997: Mark Kerr (Johnson) gets his opponent on the mat and proceeds to knee him in the face and punch him in the face until his face is streaked with blood and we can almost see the guy seeing stars. The ref calls the fight in Mark’s favor and as trainers tend to the loser, Mark wears a furrowed brow. He wants to see if the guy is OK. The guy whose skull he just tenderized. In many ways, Mark’s a gentle giant. His voice is calm and mannered, he’s well-spoken, his smile is big and wide and infectious. Later, he sits in the waiting area of a doctor’s office and spots a woman eyeing his swollen face, and takes it upon himself to strike up a friendly conversation that entails explaining some of the philosophical elements of MMA fighting, which to that point had been a highly controversial sport. The woman says she’s heard of it because “they’re trying to ban it,” and he replies that it’s designed to determine which of several centuries-old martial arts is truly the best. Mark then gives a kid an autograph, a big grin and a bit of advice: “No fighting.” You can just hear the woman telling the story to a family member later: He was a giant intimidating muscleman with a battered and swollen face, but also the nicest guy!

She doesn’t see what he does when he gets into the exam room, though – he quickly fishes through all the vials of drugs before the doctor comes in. Aha. An explanation for the Jekyll-and-Hyde-ishness of the situation? For how a man capable of such destructive violence can be a total sweetheart of a gentleman out of the ring? For a guy who was an NCAA wrestling champion, who we see headbutting his opponents into blackness, Mark seems to have no edge in his regular life. We see him at his Phoenix home with his girlfriend Dawn (Blunt), and when she feels bad for not making his protein smoothie to the proper specifications, he pats her on the leg: “It’s not your fault. You didn’t know.” Mush city. Dawn is a girly-girl with high heels and haltertops and fancy manicures. She helps him train, and they engage in some sexy, sexy stretching; they look like one of those couples who can’t keep their hands off each other. Mark has never lost a pro fight. He’s in love. He’s bounced from the struggles of the fledgling Ultimate Fighting Championship in America to Japan’s big-money Pride league. For this guy, things are going, well, smashingly.

Of course, the opioid painkillers are rounding the rough edges. He hides the vials and needles around the house. Don’t judge – if you were the one enormous person squeezed into a plane to Tokyo, you might seek out the hard stuff too. He kindly asks the passenger next to him to open the window shade; he wants to see the beautiful sunset. Then he gets off the plane and learns that Pride has banned headbutts and knees to the face. Welp. Hammerfists it is then, I guess? Dawn shows up in the locker room before his bout with a stout Russian guy (real-life champion boxer Oleksandr Usyk) and Mark looks like he’s taken a bit too much of an edge off. “Are you high?” she asks, and thus starts a big fight before the Big Fight. Jazz drums skitter as Mark’s trainer, best pal and fellow fighter Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader), tells him he has to be a “takedown guy” in order to counter the Russian’s big punches. The fight goes poorly for Mark. The Russian gets him on the mat and delivers a few knees to the head, which, hey now. No fouls are called and the ref declares the Russian the winner and Mark collects himself and briskly walks out of the ring and calmly speaks to an official about the illegal blows and makes his way to the locker room where he sits down and bursts into tears. His first loss.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Smashing Machine is MMA’s artsy take on the sport – Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior is good but more stylistically conventional – a la films like The Wrestler, The Iron Claw, and Foxcatcher.

Performance Worth Watching: Well, the Rock is acting his ass off here. No debating it. It’s the most complex character of his career, and he’s up for it, giving Kerr nuance and a deep interior life expressed wordlessly, tonally and in the way he physically carries himself. Will he nab an Oscar nod? Dunno, but the Academy does love a prosthetic nose.

Memorable Dialogue: Mark delivers this doozy with a big smile: “A day without pain is like a day without sunshine.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: There’s no big showy Oscar clip in The Smashing Machine, and that seems intentional. A couple of the bigger dramatic moments are ultimately trumped by subtler ones that illustrate Mark’s dynamic relationships with himself and Dawn: When the couple bickers over the state of a backyard cactus; or when they go to a carnival and Mark sheepishly declines riding on the gravitron because he has, in his own words, “a sensitive tummy”; or when they attend an all-too-appropriate smash-up derby, and Mark, in a bit of poignant irony, looks uncomfortable watching the violence. 

We’re prompted to consider the film as more than just a let’s get the Rock a statuette opportunity. Safdie’s intent seems to be twofold: Thematically, Smashing Machine is a story about Mark Kerr’s simmering internal conflict, as reflected in his relationships with Dawn, himself, the sport and Mark Coleman. And save for a persistent play-by-play announcer functioning as a narrator, stylistically, it’s a pushback against traditional sports pictures with their rah-rah stories of underdogs reaching the apex. Evidence for both is in the climactic scene, which occurs within Mark’s head as he lies on the mat, mid-fight. It’s a psychological climax, not one reached with a flurry of fists – or the raising of a trophy. Loll that bit of meta-commentary around on your tongue. Bitter, isn’t it? And I wager that’s intentional. Crowdpleasers are not Safdie’s forte, and it’s obvious he’s sidestepping the pitfall cliches.

So the movie is a grower. It’s also a tough one to love. “There’s no other high like that in the world,” Mark says of the thrill of victory and the adoration he receives; such is his motivation. That’s laced with irony too, because if the film hones in on one central idea, it’s that he needs to shake more than just his addiction to painkillers, and may be second-guessing his decision to participate in a profession that clashes with his easygoing demeanor. We do, however, get a significant sense of his discomfort in the world as a hulking man squeezed into the middle airplane seat and capable of splintering a kitchen door in seconds, trapped in an incompatible relationship with Dawn and facing the possibility of having to fight his closest friend for a payday. There’s little immediate satisfaction to be gleaned from a movie that puts us inside the head of a born fighter, but never inside the ring with him; Safdie captures the fights at low angles outside the ropes, primarily with tight shots emphasizing the ugly brutality of the sport. 

Such rebellions against familiar dramatic cliches mean The Smashing Machine lacks some narrative momentum – it plays out with herky-jerky realism, with understated moments of elation and deflation, instead of with a big, smooth arc. It lacks the visceral dynamic we may expect from a Safdie film. It also renders Dawn underwritten – Blunt doesn’t seem quite sure what to do with this woman – and leaves us with a similar feeling of frustration with regards to Mark’s half-developed relationship with Mark Coleman. A curious denouement adds to the film’s shaggier qualities. It’s more of a slow-and-steady tortoise drama than a swift hare. We see so many of Mark’s vulnerabilities, but very few of his strengths. Go ahead, Safdie seems to be saying, wrestle with THAT.

Our Call: The allure of seeing Johnson stretch himself creatively without the cornball fodder of similar films in the genre is more than enough to overcome The Smashing Machine’s flaws. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.