MMA fighter Mark Kerr’s road toward self-redemption is told in this collaboration between Dwayne Johnson and Benny Safdie.
Whether a biopic about an athlete is rooted in combat arts, football, baseball or even bobsledding, the sports biopic subgenre is full of movies made with a screenwriting formula that’s proven successful, but in recent years has been worn down to hindering its entries with distracting familiarity and tired cliches. It’s needed a creative filmmaker to put an ingenious spin on the subgenre for quite some time, and thankfully Benny Safdie does that with The Smashing Machine, the first film he’s directed without brother Josh to rousing success thanks to brilliant direction and writing, as well as a solid departure for Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
The titular “Smashing Machine” that Johnson plays is Mark Kerr, one of the pioneers of mixed martial arts, and a man who bases his style of fighting in amateur wrestling as well as overwhelmingly dominant and fast punches, in addition to dirty strikes like headbutts and knees to the head. He shares a living space with his girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt) and forms a friendship with fellow fighter Marc Coleman (Ryan Bader) during his undefeated rise up the card of the Ultimate Fighting Championship combat league in the first two years of his career.
But then while fighting in Japan for Pride FC in 1999, two unthinkable events happen: the rules are changed to make the headbutts and knees to the head he’s known for illegal, and he suffers his first career loss to Igor Vovchanchyn (Oleksandr Usyk) despite his use of similar tactics. Although the judges were successfully persuaded to change their decision to a No Contest, the loss is still an incident Kerr struggles to mentally accept, falling into opioid addiction, violent outbursts and general unpleasantness, especially around Dawn.
If you’ve made it this far into the review, you’re probably thinking that you’ve seen this movie before in Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece Raging Bull (1980) or Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (2008). But what’s fascinating about The Smashing Machine is its remarkable ambition to take the sports biopic subgenre and turn it on its head with the approach of following Mark Kerr’s recovery and rehabilitation from brutal, addicted fighter to a composed wrestler and respectable citizen, from clever storytelling such as an amusement park ride setting the stage for the alien feeling he experiences on his first days of sobriety, and juxtaposing his inner desire for the thrills of victory after an MMA fight with a demolition derby he’s watching with Dawn.
The script also does a good job of rounding out both Kerr and Dawn as decent people with unlikable impulses; Kerr is pleasantly charismatic on the outside but has instances of juvenile egomania that come to the surface like when he asks his doctor for stronger pain medication and tries to renegotiate his contract with Pride FC, while Dawn wants to stand by her man at every fight but struggles to keep up with his personal demands and needs.
As director, Safdie also brings a lot of the filmmaking hallmarks that he and his brother used when they made Uncut Gems and Good Time. Handheld photography and the decision to shoot the majority of The Smashing Machine on 16mm film create a raw, intrusive intimacy in private moments between Kerr and Dawn, as well as unnerving intimidation when the camera follows Kerr around his house or the hallways of an arena, leaving audiences on the edge of their seat waiting for his next move while on a drug high, or feeling the mental toll that follows a loss.
The MMA matches themselves are well staged and edited with immaculate pacing while the audio is well mixed; the punches and dirty strikes Kerr inflicts on his opponents in the beginning in particular hit really hard with bone-cracking effects that makes viewers cringe upon impact. But that’s smoothed over with a beautiful score from Belgian musician Nala Sinephro, whose shimmering fusion of contemporary synthesizers and drones with dreamy saxophone and piano conveys the uncertainty going on inside Kerr’s mind, opening us toward sympathizing with him.
The Smashing Machine is ambitious in its efforts to subvert the sports biopic canon with this story, but the observant approach paired with scenes of high realism devoid of dramatic stakes can wear on the patience of viewers looking for something more urgent or melodramatic. It’s also worth noting that while the makeup job done to make Dwayne Johnson look like Mark Kerr is excellent, and the wrestler-turned-actor’s departure into dramatic territory is admirable, but aside from a few places where he shows restraint and emotion really well, they’re few and far between his usual schtick of essentially being himself.
Dwayne Johnson’s performance may not be awards-worthy, but it’s still good enough to be engaging, and his work along with Benny Safdie’s confident writing and direction make The Smashing Machine a welcome addition into its subgenre. Patient moviegoers will feel like flies on the proverbial wall when Kerr and Dawn have heated arguments, yearn to see Kerr stay on his course toward self-improvement even when opportunities for relapse come into his view, and collectively marvel and wince during the ruthless fight scenes in the Octagon, where the most successful fighters are the dirtiest. But Mark Kerr’s story is a compelling and fresh one about the sport’s first star on a quest to preserve his humanity before he’s corrupted himself, and that’s why fans of the sport and The Rock’s endeavors in film should go see The Smashing Machine.