Dwayne Johnson has officially launched his Oscar campaign.
Following its premiere at the Venice Film Festival, the star’s latest, The Smashing Machine, is generating significant buzz — particularly for Johnson’s transformative performance. Directed by Benny Safdie and costarring Emily Blunt, the film tells the true story of Mark Kerr, a legendary mixed martial artist who rose to prominence during the early days of the UFC while privately grappling with a serious opioid addiction. To embody Kerr, Johnson underwent a striking physical transformation, aided by two-time Oscar-winning prosthetic makeup artist Kazu Hiro (Darkest Hour, Bombshell). But while critics all praise Johnson’s performance, they are mixed on the overall film, as evidenced by its 88 percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
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Owen Gleiberman of Variety offers high praise for both Johnson and Safdie. “Johnson, shifting his whole aspect (he seems like a new actor), invests that silent, moody, hidden side of Mark with a quality of mystery. He gives an extraordinary performance, playing Mark Kerr as a gentle giant with demons that will not speak their name, yet the audience can feel them there.” Gleiberman also highlights Safdie’s first solo directorial outing, noting that while the filmmaker previously codirected gritty indie dramas such as 2019’s Uncut Gems with his brother, Josh, this effort stands apart. “The Smashing Machine feels less like a Safdie brothers film than it does like The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s great movie starring Mickey Rourke as an aging professional wrestler, with maybe a dollop of Raging Bull thrown in,” Gleiberman writes, adding that the film is “an intimate, exploratory, documentary-like slice of life that hits a lot of the same notes you’d expect from a sports biopic (the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, the private ups and downs) but rarely in the way you expect.”
Deadline‘s Damon White is similarly impressed. He commends not just Johnson’s emotional depth, but his full immersion into the role, writing, “Dwayne Johnson owns the whole thing with his truly remarkable work as fighter Mark Kerr, disappearing so fully underneath Kazu Hiru’s astonishing prosthetics that the opening of the film, presented as contemporary footage from an event in Sao Paulo 1997, looks genuinely like the real thing.”
Echoing this sentiment, IndieWire‘s Ryan Lattanzio hails Johnson’s performance as a career milestone: “out-and-out wonderful, a beady-eyed fusion of body and spirit that osmoses Safdie’s sensibility to deliver what can’t be disputed as the most layered work of the actor’s career.”
However, not all critics are fully convinced. Kevin Maher of The Times (U.K.)delivers a more scathing take, writing, “Emily Blunt and Dwayne Johnson star in the awards season equivalent of a ‘fugazi’ diamond. It looks like an Oscar contender, it sparkles like an Oscar contender, but on closer inspection it’s entirely plastic and mostly worthless.” Still, even within his criticism, Maher acknowledges Blunt’s talents, calling her “a gifted comedic actress, with the sharpest timing in the business.” Yet, he argues that in her role as Kerr’s girlfriend, she’s “often exposed by a screenplay that asks her to emulate the Amy Adams role from The Fighter, or Julia Fox from Uncut Gems.”
Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri offers a similar critique regarding the film’s emotional edge. While he finds The Smashing Machine compelling, he believes it ultimately doesn’t pull its punches. “Quite possibly the softest, gentlest movie you’ll ever see about a dude whose job is to beat the crap out of other dudes,” he writes. He also echoes concerns about Blunt’s underutilized role, noting, “Blunt, a fine actress, does what she can, but the film doesn’t give us enough of her or their relationship to get any kind of handle on the character.”
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