‘The Smashing Machine’ review: Dwayne Johnson shines in otherwise dull film

Don’t buy that bowl, I muttered, as Dwayne Johnson cradled it in his huge hands. It’s a Japanese bowl and will obviously break at some point, and will then be repaired by someone who can’t quite pronounce ‘kintsugi’ but says it anyway, upon which Oscar voters will have their minds blown by the realization that you’re a broken man who needs putting together.

Anyway, Mark Kerr buys the bowl. He’s an MMA fighter at the turn of the century, a pioneer in a sport that’s still finding its feet. Japan hosts the biggest tournament, and he’s a big deal there—though not so much back home in America, where he patiently explains mixed martial arts to an old lady in a doctor’s waiting room. The gentleness with which he does so is key. Mark is a giant of a man with swollen ears and a face like boiled ham, but an earnest, friendly manner. “Am I going to hurt him before he hurts me?” is his stated aim—and yet, Johnson makes him immensely sympathetic and easy to root for.

There’s a fine documentary from 2002, also called The Smashing Machine, featuring the real Mark Kerr. Benny Sadie’s film uses scenes from it verbatim: the waiting room conversation; the camera tracking Mark as he stomps off after his first defeat; the fighter emerging from rehab, dragging a suitcase, grinning at his girlfriend, Dawn, who’s come to pick him up. Safdie’s aesthetic here is also documentary-like in the traditional sense: scenes shot on 16mm, conversations caught on the fly, the camera following, lurking, watching from a corner.

The documentary touched on the personal difficulties Mark and Dawn (played here by Emily Blunt) go through; Safdie’s film concentrates on them. Mark gets addicted to pain meds, then makes an effort to quit. Dawn has her own dependencies—pills, alcohol—but her partner seems more put off when she intrudes upon his world of fighting. He’s entirely fulfilled there; he doesn’t need her around to feel perfectly happy when he’s training or fighting. This is underlined in a crudely simple scene where he rejects her comfor after a loss but warmly greets his opponent, relegating her to photographer duty.

Benny Safdie, directing solo for the first time without his brother, Josh, has the right actors and the right tone, alternately brutal and tender. But he can’t resist spelling out obvious themes and subtexts. There’s a laughably solemn zoom into the opioid warning on a medicine bottle. Mark, post-rehab, uses the word ‘high’ thrice in quick succession to describe the sport’s appeal, while also complaining about Dawn’s enabling behaviour. An Elvis cover of “I Did It My Way” plays over a redemption montage of Mark in training.

Safdie makes one canny musical decision—the woozy jazz on the soundtrack seems in tune with Mark’s softly disoriented manner. But there’s also a disastrous filmmaking choice with Bruce Springsteen’s “Jungleland”. This is a tricky song to use in a film, with its distinct phases and overwhelming force. It starts playing in the background during a particularly stormy argument between Dawn and Mark. Safdie uses a lull in the fight to bring the song front and centre. But at the most dramatic moment of the altercation, the charged emotion of “the street’s on fire in a real death waltz” competes with the action. And the song’s final burst with racing piano and Springsteen’s wordless cries doesn’t have an image that can match up.

The Smashing Machine is an atypical sports film in that it steadfastly refuses to tell a story through its fights. The bouts are shown to us in quick flashes; I don’t recall the film spending more than a few minutes on any of them. Mark speaks of MMA like an exciting new frontier but the film echoes none of his exhilaration; the action is deliberately cramped and brutal. Here, and elsewhere, the film seems to hope unadorned plainness might equal profundity.

Johnson submits himself fully to the film, and is surprisingly touching. It seems right that Mark’s core discipline is wrestling, a fighting style that forces one to get close rather than attack from a slight distance. Mark is all about that contact, that connection, but Safdie fails him and Johnson. In the final scene, Johnson is replaced by Kerr. It’s an empty flourish, a choice that says nothing besides ‘give my film an Oscar for hair and makeup’.