Honey Don’t
My thoughts on The Smashing Machine
It only took a few minutes of watching The Smashing Machine, Benny Safdie’s biopic of mixed martial artist Mark Kerr, to realize that I was simply not responding to any of the material unfolding on the screen. At first, I thought that perhaps it was because of my general level of ignorance and disinterest regarding the sport—indeed, any sport that involves opponents punching, kicking or wrestling each other—but after a while, I began to realize that there was more to it than just that. (Hell, I once saw a four-hour-long Bollywood epic centered around a cricket match and despite knowing even less about that sport, I found that film to be absolutely spellbinding from start to finish.) The problem, quite simply, is that I just didn’t care about any of it. I didn’t care about Kerr, the people in his life or the personal and professional ups and downs that the film was chronicling. Even more significantly, I could never quite grasp what it was about Kerr’s story that Safdie found so compelling that he wanted to bring it to the screen, let alone make it his first solo filmmaking venture.
The film opens with Kerr (Dwayne Johnson) in 1997 during his breakthrough bouts at a championship tournament in Brazil during the early days of MMA before becoming a global success and afterwards in a doctor’s office trying to sweet-talk an elderly woman about the positive aspects of the sport that are somewhat belied by the bruising all over his face. While he tries to paint a rosy picture to people like that woman, the truth is a little more complicated, mostly due to the opioid addiction that he has developed as a result of trying to manage the pain from all of the significant injuries he has accumulated over the years in his pursuit of glory. Although he hides it well enough during training and in the ring, the cracks begin to show in regards to the relationship that he has with his girlfriend, Dawn (Emily Blunt), that can shift from lovey-dovey talk to full-throttle, door-smashing dustups in an instant.
When the unthinkable happens and Kerr loses a match—despite his complaints to the referee about penalties not being called—he falls to pieces and is hospitalized and sent to rehab. When he emerges, he does manage to maintain his sobriety but the tensions between him and Dawn seem to have been exacerbated. He is constantly snipping at her for this and that and when she goes off to have a couple of drinks with her girlfriends, he takes it as an insult to him and his sobriety issues and jumps on the phone to his AA sponsor to complain about her. Eventually, Kerr gets a chance at a championship that will set him up financially for life if he wins, even if it means possibly fighting best pal and occasional coach Mark Coleman (Ryan Badger) for that life-changing purse. Meanwhile, Kerr’s relationship with Dawn grows increasingly volatile, building to a major blowup that leaves him forced to make a choice about what is more important to him—his girlfriend or the sport that he has suffered so much for over the years.
Some of this may sound sort of interesting in theory, particularly the implication that Dawn’s relationship with Kerr was actually healthier when he was an addict and that sobriety has made him far more difficult to be with. The problem is that Safdie never quite figures out a way to make any of it come alive, either dramatically or emotionally. I admit that I have found the films that he co-directed with brother Josh, to be not much of anything (especially the wildly overrated Uncut Gems, which received inexplicable praise despite being little more than a rehash of stuff that James Toback did with more intensity and crackpot dramatic flair decades earlier) but least those films had moments of genuine life as well as elements that made you understand why they felt compelled to tell these stories. He never figures out a way to connect viewers with the story he is telling or the milieu he is exploring, instead keeping them at an odd remove throughout. Instead, he tries to paper over the emotional shortcomings with flashy camera moves and a soundtrack so overblown that it includes a live recording of Elvis singing “My Way” and it is only the second-most over-the-top needle drop on display. The most over-the-top occurs during the climactic confrontation between Kerr and Dawn that is backed by Bruce Springsteen’s epic “Jungleland”—in its entirety—with all the high points and lulls in the tune matching the ones the characters are undergoing with sledgehammer-like subtlety, done with all the flair and verve of a YouTube mashup video.
Having spent the last decade or so on a slew of slickly made but utterly anonymous action films and family-friendly projects, The Smashing Machine marks Dwayne Johnson’s most overt bid to date to be considered a serious actor, even going so far as to slap on numerous facial prosthetics in a bid to look more like Kerr. From a physical perspective, he is more than convincing in the role and he does have a couple of scenes (particularly the one extended moment following his first loss in which his bravado gradually crumbles into vulnerability) where he is able to properly demonstrate his actual gifts as an actor (which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who saw Southland Tales). There are far too few of those moments and Johnson never really connects with the character except on the most superficial of levels. That said, he comes off better than Blunt, who is one of the best actresses around but who is stuck playing a character so cliched that it feel more like the Heidi Gardner SNL parody. Since neither one can make their respective characters into plausible people, we never buy the intensity of their relationship and since we don’t buy that, the entire emotional center of the story is left wanting. The film is even lacking in the kind of juicy supporting performances that are usually found in Safdie’s films—the only significant player beyond the two leads is Badger, who is himself an actual MMA fighter making his acting debut, and while he is believable in the various training sequences, he is far less sure-footed when it comes to delivering dialogue.
While The Smashing Machine does make an attempt to be different than the typical true-life sports narrative, it never finds a way of making it dramatically interesting. Safdie clearly has affection for Kerr and sympathy for his plight as someone who was one of the key building blocks for mixed martial arts and the UFC, only to see their career collapse just before they both broke into the mainstream in a big way. However, that affection has not been translated cinematically and it just bogs down into a strangely inert and oftentimes too familiar saga of someone whose story does not seem particularly worthy of a big screen treatment, at least as depicted here.