First reviews are out for The Smashing Machine, the first solo directorial effort from indie favorite Benny Safdie, which debuted this evening in Venice.
The film stars Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt. The story follows fighter Mark Kerr (Johnson) from the no-holds-barred era of the UFC at the peak of his career as he questions himself and struggles with life and his relationships. Meanwhile, Mark’s girlfriend Dawn Staples (Blunt) struggles as well to find her place in Mark’s chaotic and contradictory world.
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The early reviews are mixed; however, there appears to be a consensus among the critics about the surprising quality of Johnson’s leading performance.
In his review, Deadline’s Damon Wise wrote: “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.”
In an article titled “Dwayne Johnson is a real actor, and potentially a future Oscar winner”, The Independent also praised the veteran WWE actor’s performance.
However, despite early flourishes, the newspaper states that the film struggles to maintain its momentum, concluding that the narrative “begins to seem very hollow.”
“The real way Safdie puts a chokehold on his audience is by examining Mark and Dawn’s physical and emotional weaknesses in such forensic detail,” the newspaper states. “The Smashing Machine may not provide the pay-offs that audiences expect from more conventional sports movies, but this is the most raw and vulnerable that Johnson has ever been on screen. Once you’ve seen him this exposed, you won’t watch his typical action movie stunts in quite the same way ever again.”
Indiewire states that “Johnson is an ideal match for Safdie and the material, bridging without sensation or cloying affect the disconnect between who Mark is in the octagon (intimidating, undefeated, all primal machismo energy) and who he is outside the cage (wounded, insecure, cauliflower-eared).”
Little White Lies also praised Johnson’s performance alongside Blunt, but zeroed in on the film’s unique approach to sports drama. The outlet said Safdie “shuns the trappings of traditional sporting biopics obsessed with the concept of sacrificing everything in the name of victory.”
“Safdie works in a different mode to the swollen melodrama of many genre mates – even the greatest among them – and a key influence is John Hyams’ raw and revealing 1997 documentary, which also gives this film its name,” the outlet said. “Some moments are recreated, such as Kerr earnestly explaining UFC to a lightly baffled woman in a doctor’s waiting room, but much has been condensed, and this is to the film’s benefit as it avoids becoming a by-the-book account of Kerr’s life so far.”
However, not all the reviews have been positive. In a piece titled “The Smashing Machine Is Too Soft for Its Own Good,” Vulture magazine states that Johnson is “kind of the only thing in the movie.”
“Although The Smashing Machine also portrays Kerr’s struggles with opioid addiction and his turbulent romance with his girlfriend Dawn Staples (Emily Blunt), whom he’d eventually marry, these elements get pared down along with much of the rest of the drama,” the magazine wrote.
The magazine added that the film “particularly fails” Blunt’s Dawn, “whose frustrations get quite a bit of lip service but little depiction,” it said.
Variety described Johnson’s performance as a “revelation” and praised Safdie’s subtle interrogation of Kerr’s fame and persona.
“The Smashing Machine isn’t a sports movie that wants to jerk a Pavlovian response of triumph out of us,” the outlet wrote. “It’s after something subtler and more moving. By the end of the film, Mark, who had grown so used to winning, has won in the most transformative way. He has found the man buried inside the machine.”
A24 will release the film theatrically on October 3.
Venice runs until September 6.
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