TIFF ’25: The Smashing Machine

**/****
starring Dwayne Johnson, Emily Blunt, Ryan Bader, Bas Rutten
written and directed by Benny Safdie

by Angelo Muredda The early narrative on Dwayne Johnson’s starring role as veteran mixed-martial artist Mark Kerr in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine was that it was sure to mark an overdue career reinvention for the wrestler turned actor turned annoying social-media poster. After years of his star power waning in terms of prestige as well as audience appeal–the decline measured in cringe posts about how the “hierarchy of power in the DC universe is about to change” thanks to his appearance in Black Adam (which bombed) and unflattering headlines about how his character in the Fast & Furious franchise was contractually forbidden from losing a fight onscreen (which made him seem not invulnerable but narcissistic)–finally Johnson would develop both the deft comic touch and dramatic depth he’d shown in Richard Kelly’s Southland Tales and Michael Bay’s Pain & Gain. That Johnson is every bit as good as was promised by the PR campaign, as vulnerable and bruised onscreen as he has been aloof and guarded in real life, comes as something of a monkey’s paw situation, given that his fluid and charming performance is one of the only things worth unreservedly recommending in the otherwise fairly standard film. Despite the outcome at the Venice Film Festival, which saw Johnson go home critically lauded but empty-handed while Safdie took the Best Director prize, Johnson’s ascent comes at the expense of his director’s first real draw as an artist–a slightly spiky but mostly unremarkable sports biopic worthy of being in the awards conversation, in the derogatory sense.

The trailblazer who recently co-created the abrasive and singular television series “The Curse” with Nathan Fielder, and who, with his brother Josh, has co-directed some of the most feverishly pitched American independents of this century, seems content to serve in his solo debut feature as a low-key realist handmaiden to his star’s next chapter as a serious actor. Wisely if predictably narrowing the story to the three years leading up to Kerr’s ascent and crash-out at the 2000 Pride Fighting Championships in Japan, which was also the subject of the similarly titled HBO documentary The Smashing Machine: The Life and Times of Extreme Fighter Mark Kerr (directed by John Hyams), Safdie chronicles the UFC pioneer’s professional ups and downs at home and abroad in tandem with his personal struggles, including a life-threatening opiate addiction and a volatile on-again, off-again relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt). Taking a number of its dialogue exchanges, thematic motifs, and stylistic traits from the documentary and aesthetically anchored in the same post-Dardenne Brothers realism of earlier awards-bait wounded-warrior movies like Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler (albeit with a pleasant helping of period-specific local colour on the soundtrack and a more naturalistic approach to dialogue), Safdie’s film feels a bit superfluous except as a hype reel for the actors and a probable memoir launch down the line for its forgotten subject, who had the misfortune of putting his body on the line for the sport before it was the lucrative cultural touchstone it is now, as the didactic closing title cards spell out over images of the real Kerr carrying groceries to his car in anonymity.

Safdie’s desire to tell rather than show what’s special about Kerr for the uninitiated in mixed-martial arts spills into his depiction of the sport, from an unnecessarily position-paper-coded early moment where Kerr explains the philosophical ins and outs of fighting to an elderly woman at a clinic–a bit that is no less expository for the fact that it’s copped straight from a real moment in the documentary–to a scene where veteran fighter and trainer Bas Rutten, as himself, explicitly comments on the brave new world of fighters these days, who melt their pain away with opiates. Little of this self-annotation feels necessary, considering Kerr’s pain and anxiety–and the emotionally levelling release of drugs–are perfectly captured by Johnson’s vacant, mile-wide stare into the distance whenever Kerr gets high. (“Look like what?” he asks, halfheartedly, as Dawn says she doesn’t know what to do with him when she catches him looking like a zombie on the couch after sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night.) And as sweet and self-effacing as Kerr is while explaining the etiquette of fighting to the old lady in the clinic, Johnson is even more disarming when playing Kerr as a big strong man with the tiniest sense of self-worth in his civilian life outside the ring, as when he anxiously whines to Dawn that he can’t get on the Gravitron ride at the local carnival in Scottsdale, Arizona, “because you know what that would do to my tummy.”

The problem is that outside of the acute depiction of opiate addiction and recovery and this amusingly incongruous portrait of a strong yet sensitive and soft-spoken man–supported by a brusque but loving group of men like his friend, sometimes trainer, and occasional competitor Mark Coleman (invested with a dopey earnestness and real physicality by fighter Ryan Bader)–there’s too little here to justify the project. Certainly, there isn’t much character development extended to the film’s other ostensible protagonist, who has figured about as prominently in the advertising as Kerr. To Safdie and Blunt’s credit, Dawn’s mercurial party-girl partner struggling with the new reality of dating a man with a quasi-religious commitment to bettering himself isn’t quite the hacky supportive-girlfriend role promised by the trailers. The moments where Dawn tunes out as Kerr prattles on about what the tournament means to him, like someone with ADHD struggling to listen to their spouse describe the dream they’ve woken up from in mind-numbing detail, are not uninteresting. But outside of these flecks of real character, and contrary to Blunt’s prominent billing, her Dawn is largely a passenger, watching things happen from over Kerr’s shoulder in the way that athletes’ wives tend to do in these movies.

It’s a frequent refrain throughout the film that when fighters get knocked out or submit, the referee looks into their eyes and asks, “Do you know where you are?” You might ask the same of Safdie, a typically ambitious filmmaker who, with The Smashing Machine, seems to be hungrier for mainstream acceptance and bigger budgets, even if it means sacrificing some of his singularity as an artist to make an almost beat-for-beat retread of a twenty-year-old documentary. Safdie has acquitted himself well enough here, and the Venice award speaks for itself as the opening round to his own championship fight (which may yet have his brother on the card, given the upcoming release of Marty Supreme). Still, you have to wonder if, like Kerr confessing his disappointment in himself for his recent performance issues in a direct address to Japanese fans ahead of the tournament, he isn’t feeling a bit tapped out just as he’s on the verge of something big. Programme: Special Presentations