Dwayne Johnson Will Body-Slam Your Heart in The Smashing Machine: Review

Few movies have represented a turning point in an actor’s career quite like The Smashing Machine. Written and directed by Benny Safdie, the A24 release stars Dwayne Johnson (cue the booming movie trailer voice) like you’ve never seen him before, in this case playing real-life MMA fighter Mark Kerr, who took plenty of blows outside the ring as well as in it.

Playing a real person in a biopic is one of Hollywood’s “easy” hacks for becoming a prestige actor, the equation being a simple one: Devote serious time, energy, and (if necessary) prosthetics to sculpt one’s appearance in the image of another, dive hard into researching the person’s life, and then give a performance that at least attempts to capture the essence of who that person was.

There’s another layer to this, though, which is that it’s a lot easier for actors like Robert De Niro or Cate Blanchett to find real historical figures to play than it is for, say, actors like Johnson. That’s because Johnson is a performer whose very specific physical type has made him easy casting for movies like Doom, Rampage, and movies that aren’t exactly based on video games but feel like they are anyway. It’s part of why he’s become one of the 21st century’s greatest action stars.

Johnson’s size isn’t the only reason for his stardom, though; his innate charisma was essential to his making the leap from heel to face, as they say in the ol’ WWE, helping him shift from Scorpion King baddies to lovable figures like Moana’s Maui. He’s also been stretching himself as an actor for longer than he perhaps gets credit for: This humble writer is not at all suggesting that the HBO dramedy Ballers was the peak of prestige TV. But — to use a metaphor the man himself would appreciate — those five seasons of television were functionally a gym which he used to develop muscles untrained by Fast and Furious movies.

The Smashing Machine, though, represents a very different kind of challenge for Johnson, one to which he rises admirably. Safdie sets the movie from 1997-2000, a period of time when MMA fighting was on the rise but far from reaching its later cultural impact. Mark Kerr, as an early pioneer of the sport, isn’t a household name but begins the film as an undefeated champion, one who excels at pinning his opponents to the mat and then pummeling them into submission.

This isn’t easy work, of course, and brings with it no shortage of physical toil, with the added bonus of a painkiller addiction to boot. The movie documents Kerr’s substance abuse issues in a matter-of-fact way — he got treatment, he got better — which could come off as pat and glib, except being sober doesn’t fix all of Mark’s problems, especially when it comes to his tempestuous relationship with girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt).

The Smashing Machine Review Dwayne Johnson Emily Blunt

The Smashing Machine (A24)

Really, the fights that cause the greatest amount of stress on screen take place between Mark and Dawn. While Emily Blunt brings everything she can to the role, and she and Johnson have a natural ease between them on camera, Dawn feels so underwritten as a character that her emotional outbursts are hard to track. Mark and Dawn didn’t have children during the time period being depicted, but it’s still hard to not hear echoes of Heidi Gardner’s Angel, Every Boxer’s Girlfriend from Every Movie About Boxing Ever in Blunt’s performance. Mostly because there’s so little else to connect with in regards to her character.

Something Safdie’s script doesn’t dig too hard into is the fact that the very nature of MMA means that fighters with wildly different skill sets clash together in the ring, all with their advantages and disadvantages. Perhaps that’s because at multiple points throughout the film, it feels like Safdie is actively trying to avoid making a sports movie — a relatively impossible thing to escape given the subject matter, though it helps that the third act eschews most of the most clichéed tropes of the genre.

This isn’t the first time Johnson has played a real person — the 2013 drama Pain & Gain was based on true events — and Mark Kerr isn’t the only historical figure that he could theoretically play. However, telling Kerr’s story is still a perfect choice for the actor: Kerr’s lack of fame means the expectations for Johnson’s performance aren’t nearly on the same level as an actor taking on Elvis or Lincoln, and while their experiences in life haven’t been exactly identical, it’s easy to see how Johnson connects with the physicality demanded by the MMA life.

Johnson never fully disappears into the role, but were he to do so, it might almost diminish his performance — one which never distracts from the narrative, but keeps present the awareness that Johnson is really going through it here. If he made it look easy, it somehow wouldn’t be quite as impressive. While Johnson’s performance feels fueled by his willingness to really go for prestige gold, Safdie ensures that the movie never descends into too-treacly territory, his verité style bringing out the necessary roughness this story requires.

In some ways, The Smashing Machine feels like a testament to the struggle that comes with getting older and accepting one’s limitations in life; the turning point only possible after a person embraces both their strengths and weaknesses with an open heart. This means that Johnson’s most vulnerable moments as Mark are the defeated ones, brought to the screen with minimal melodrama but maximum impact. There’s one key moment where the camera stays on Johnson’s bare back, letting us see the weight it can bear. Then, the camera pans to his face, which reveals the weight he can’t.

The Smashing Machine smashes into theaters on October 3rd. Check out the trailer below.