Directed by: Benny Safdie
Distributed by: A24
Written by Patrick Hao
55/100
Benny Safdie’s work in collaboration with his brother Josh has been about people on the margins. It is fitting that “The Smashing Machine,” based on the 2002 John Hyams’ documentary of the same name about early American MMA star Mark Kerr, is Safdie’s first solo directorial effort. Mark Kerr was a star in the UFC and MMA before it was legitimized in America as a sport and corporatized by an IPO. The sport was raw and violently intimate, something Safdie tries to capture in his film. Kerr is a contradictory figure. Nicknamed “The Smashing Machine,” Kerr is a hulking man, mainly torso, who spoke softly and thought deeply – the antithesis of the macho confident image that you would associate with a man of his size, or, in this case, the Hollywood star that would play him, Dwayne Johnson.
Kerr is a curious subject matter for the Hollywood treatment. Though he achieved early success in the UFC and Pride, he remains a marginal figure within most of the faithful MMA fans. There’s no Rocky Balboa narrative here. By contrast, his trainer and best friend Mark Coleman (played by real-life fighter Ryan Bader) follows a trajectory that fits neatly into familiar sports-movie tropes. But Safdie has always shown interest in sports mediocrity. In that way, “The Smashing Machine” feels like a spiritual sequel to “Lenny Cooke,” Safdie’s documentary with his brother about a high school phenom who could never make it in the NBA. Safdie brings that documentarian intimacy shown in “Lenny Cooke” to “The Smashing Machine,” which borders on voyeuristic. The film always seems to linger on for a little too long in a moment of privacy. The home scenes, especially where Kerr is with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), are intimately uncomfortable.
But the same can be said of the documentary. Safdie’s approach to Kerr’s story is almost too fidelitous to the source documentary. Entire scenes, lines, and beats are lifted wholesale to the point that you almost expect the Hyams and his documentary crew to appear as characters. Moments of consequence occur offscreen — a 28-day rehab stint for painkillers, a final reconciliation with Dawn — leaving the narrative strangely hollow. The film gestures at traditional biopic narrative beats but never seems eager to fulfill them. Audacious? Perhaps. Satisfying? Rarely.
Dawn herself suffers from every cinematic girlfriend-of-a-combat-sports-star syndrome. Blunt and the screenplay gesture toward depth, but the film is so overwhelmingly Kerr-centric that Dawn often reads as a nag and a foil. This comes to a head in an action the film asks us to care about but never earns, leaving the character frustratingly and emotionally flat.
The film is also not helped by the meta-textual aspect of Dwayne Johnson being the star of this film. Johnson has been more a brand than an actor for over fifteen years. The narrative surrounding the film centers on whether he could actually make a prestige drama and win an Oscar. And meta-textual casting can work (e.g., Ben Affleck in “Gone Girl” or Tom Cruise in “Top Gun: Maverick”). But for all the discourse around Dwayne Johnson’s “transformative” turn, his performance feels more studied than lived-in. You can see the actor working – every restraint, every prosthetic. It’s the kind of self-conscious capital “A” Acting that can be so distracting. Johnson is clearly trying to shed the mega-star veneer, but in doing so, he exposes the artifice of the movie, which comes in stark contrast to the modus operandi of extreme intimacy Safdie is trying to instill.
“The Smashing Machine” is most interesting as a biopic about un-greatness – an MMA fighter without the killer instinct to dominate. This is less about Michael Jordan than it is about Toni Kukoc. If only I could take the Rock crying seriously.
“The Smashing Machine” Trailer
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