The Smashing Machine review – Dwayne Johnson only possible casting as crisis-riddled UFC champ Mark Kerr | Film

BEnny Safdie wrote and made a solid brother’s drama for the Fans of the UFC fans and perhaps a little beyond. This is the central crisis in the life of the Montagne-Montagne Mark Kerr, the US MMA pioneer and the ultimate combat champion, which in 1997 found itself in the ring, or perhaps the cage, with its demons after the unthinkable humiliation of the loss for the first time.

This feature is in fact developed from a 2002 documentary on Kerr with the same title. He confronted his drug addiction, his relational anxieties and the question of the life of a devil life if you cannot just win all the time. Kerr is played by Dwayne Johnson, a colossus of muscle surmounted by a head the size of the rock of the Indiana Jones, a body on which the only visible grease waved the neck. The appearance of Johnson is modified by narrow frizzy hair and facial prostheses that make it look like Jon Favreau playing Hulk. No other casting was possible from a distance – not unless Timothee Chalamet spits the swelling. (Sacha Baron Cohen could do it these days and would probably want to play it just as seriously and not satirical as Johnson.)

The terrible existential nightmare of the loss – a possibility for which no one in the professional or personal circle of Kerr seemed to have prepared it – causes this giant statue of a man to oscillate and reverse. Kerr must throw his opioids into the trash, enter the detoxification treatment and treat again with the important people of his life; One of them is his best boyfriend, coach and combat rival Mark Coleman, slightly played in wood here by Ryan Bader, a real MMA fighter without acting experience who does not seem so exotically like Kerr.

In the first days of MMA, the championship took place in Japan and his name was Pride; These extremely constructed male specimens would rumble, cluster and fight under this title, and a most playful and less respectful film of the brand could have tried a gag here, or wondered if there were emotional aspects of the sport that had been unexplored. The other person in Mark’s life, however, is his girlfriend Dawn, has played with sympathy and spirit of Emily Blunt, who must curl up and start like Mark, in an imposing rage, will sometimes put his fist through the kitchen door. Immediately after the defeat, Kerr has a breakdown that makes him collapse; By regaining awareness, he remembers the doctor testing him by asking him who the president – he replied “Ronald Reagan”, a moment of political significance Droll that Safdie did not stress.

The post-reinstating scenes of trials and petulanting of Johnson with an overview are lively and painful; He rumbles it so as not to properly prune her giant cactus and do not take the leaves out of the pool. Dawn realizes that when her husband was drinking and the permanent palpitation of pain ended up with opioids, he was a sweet and loving boyfriend. Has sobriety revealed a bad guy guy who always laughs at her sponsor AA? And is Dawn really less important to mark than his boyfriend Coleman, that he might have to fight for the world championship?

It’s hard to say. The film does not really allow the various crises and emotional problems to replace the importance of fighting a lot, and the fights itself are not transformed or transfigured in the drama. Even the culmination of the great comfort of Kerr-Coleman does not quite clearly show if Kerr has somehow chosen his girlfriend on his friend and his sport. The film does not reach the tragedy or extreme dysfunction, like The Iron Claw by Sean Durkin from 2023 or Foxcatcher of Bennett Miller a decade earlier, and Safdie is not going for large sets, like a boxing film, with combat scenes in the locker room.

However, there is a brave moment when Kerr, in shock after his loss, walks in the corridors, politely complains to the sponsor of his opponent breaking the rules; Still in sweat and in his trunks, he then descends from one floor in the elevator, which makes you think of a member of the restaurants of the room who carries the bread twice to enter with him … Then Kerr Fonte in tears in his locker room. These moments of vulnerability are touching, although I hope that the film could have promoted the excellent frank element to equal status in drama.