The Smashing Machine

Mark Kerr, a dominant mixed martial arts fighter in the early 2000s, leverages his amateur wrestling background to crush opponents in the cage. Outside the ring, his intense career strains his relationship with his girlfriend, while a growing opioid addiction threatens to unravel his personal life and professional success.

The Smashing Machine Review

Few filmmakers have so spectacularly failed to capitalize on a story as overwhelmingly stuffed with low-hanging dramatic fruit as The Smashing Machine. Mark Kerr’s rise to MMA prominence, fall from grace, and comeback are a storyteller’s fantasy come to life, with every narrative peak and valley imaginable—a toxic romance, drug abuse, and a best friend whose own comeback story runs parallel and in conflict with the main character’s. Throw in one of the world’s biggest stars who’s prepared to give it his all in an attempt to reinvent himself as a dramatic actor, and this movie should have been a grand slam, game-winning Hail Mary, slam dunk, knockout, hole-in-one, shut-out, and whatever other sports metaphor that you can think of.

                   

Unfortunately, in what I can only guess was an attempt to differentiate the film from the standard sports biopics playbook, writer/director Benny Safdie forgot that audience investment requires more than the endless nagging of narcissistic girlfriends or poorly written subtextual exposition dumps by narrators posing as ring announcers. With The Smashing Machine, the twenty-year veteran and writer/director of the award-winning and critically acclaimed Uncut Gems, starring Adam Sandler, displays a complete lack of cinematic instincts. Conflicts are either resolved too easily or off-screen, and the only interpersonal tension given any real focus — between Kerr and Emily Blunt’s character — plays out as repetitive variations on a theme, with its resolution likewise occurring off-screen.

Robbed almost as much as the audience, The Rock shows potential in his performances that is ultimately squashed by the flat script and fumbled direction. Johnson, who (as an actor) is best known for playing the same tough-guy character in one mostly crappy film after another, but showed some range in the pre-race-baiting seasons of HBO’s Ballers, does a commendable job of trading in his well-known blustering swagger for Kerr’s soft-spokenness. He is most definitely not playing The Rock, which makes it that much more frustrating that the script gives him so few opportunities to explore any other dimensions of the character. That his facial expressions seem to be severely muted by the otherwise transformative makeup does him no good.

As for the rest of the cast, all give believable performances, but with so little narrative importance, they barely rise above being background noise.

Ultimately, The Smashing Machine will ground and pound all but the most forgiving of audiences into a boredom coma.

WOKE REPORT

Nothing

• Something has to happen for something woke to happen.