The first time I saw a trailer for The Smashing Machine, I kept thinking the lead actor looked familiar but couldn’t place him. Then I missed when the guy’s name was flashed on the screen. The second time I saw it, my girlfriend was with me, and we both had the same reaction, “That was Dwayne Johnson!?!” The Rock is probably one of the most recognizable actors on the planet. That was a total transformation as his normally bare head had hair, his tattoos were clearly covered up, his face looked oddly different, and even his whole demeanor seemed as unlike Johnson’s usual screen presence as it could get. Add in Emily Blunt as his love interest, and this movie was either a major departure for Johnson or the most bizarre sequel to that Jungle Cruise movie as you can get.
Then again, one of the Safdie brothers directed The Smashing Machine, and those guys got an unexpectedly good performance out of Adam Sandler in Uncut Gems. Maybe Barry Safdie could do the same with Johnson in this based-on-a-true-story retelling of a few years in the life of UFC fighter Mark Kerr.
Johnson stars as Kerr, a promising fighter in the UFC with a focus on wrestling as the movie opens. He’s something of a gentle giant in many ways, a soft-spoken man who will ask if an opponent is OK if he thinks he hurt the guy too much. He has a live-in girlfriend, Dawn (Blunt), and many things seem to be going his way. Other things not so much. He has an addiction to opioid painkillers, and he doesn’t take losing in the ring very well. The former leads to some issues that force him to step away from the sport he loves so much. The latter doesn’t help much there.
However, he does get his comeback and makes his attempts in a big tournament that could end with a big final match with his longtime friend and sometime trainer Mark Coleman (Ryan Bader). But he needs to get there first, all while staying clean and keeping things well with Dawn since he does his worst when those two are having problems at home. But this movie isn’t really a plot-centered one. It’s essentially a character study, focused on Mark Kerr, his strengths, his weaknesses, and his desire to win above all. When my girlfriend and I were leaving the theater, she wasn’t sure how she felt about the movie until I made the character study remark, and then we had a good chat on what that meant.
That’s actually perhaps what makes this movie what it is. There’s a moment where Blunt’s Dawn says Johnson’s Kerr doesn’t know anything about her, and as soon as she said it, I realized I didn’t know a lot about her, including her last name. There are moments outside of Kerr’s experiences that give glimpses of what it’s like. Dawn has a single outing with a friend. Coleman’s home life with a wife and kids looks harried but refreshingly normal and one he finds contentment with. But these are fleeting moments as the focus is clearly on Kerr and his life.
As it is, Johnson actually gives a solid performance as Kerr. He’s not the bombastic or effortlessly cool guy he tries to be normally, but he’s doing something interesting here as a man whose focus is only on certain things, and the movie actually plays up to that. Johnson’s Kerr has the right amount of chemistry with Blunt’s Dawn to emphasize how much she matters to him, and he keeps his voice quiet, somehow seeming smaller despite the mass of muscle he has. I wouldn’t call it one of the all-time great performances or anything, nor do I feel the mild anger that I did about Adam Sandler’s turn in the aforementioned Uncut Gems where I realized he could do better and just often chose not to. But this one was clearly something Johnson put a lot of effort into, and he’s not getting any younger, so maybe he should be working more on projects like this one and not his usual “big friendly guy” thing that he often has going on. I can get behind that if I get more like what I got here.
Grade: A-
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