Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine isn’t what you think it is, especially if you think it’s a movie about a British guy who thinks his typewriter is the tops.
The Smashing Machine would seem to bear all the hallmarks of something grittier, darker and more disturbing than it is. It’s the solo directorial debut of the younger Safdie, whose films with his brother, Josh, have rarely not sprinted headlong into unsettling tumult. Add that sensibility to a true-life tale of a mixed martial arts fighter in the late ’90s, and it’s only natural to spend much of The Smashing Machine bracing for tragedy, for some ear-splitting descent into macho calamity.
Yet The Smashing Machine, starring Dwayne Johnson as MMA pioneer Mark Kerr, is something simpler and less curious. A lack of probing was never anything you could accuse a Safdie brothers’ movie of; these are the filmmakers who plunged a camera into the body cavity of a jewelry-store owner in Uncut Gems. But, despite its grainy, VHS aesthetics, The Smashing Machine is a surprisingly conventional and oddly untroubled movie, albeit one that gives Johnson an indie-film platform for one of his finest performances.
As Mark, Johnson has drained away much of his big-screen charisma. The part — brawny, often shirtless, frequently raging in the ring — is immediately so close to Johnson’s own professional wrestling background that early scenes look almost documentary-like. But gone is the megawatt grin and the dashing eyebrow lift. Johnson’s normally polished bald head is here covered with a closely cropped dark head of hair.
In the movie’s opening, Mark rhapsodizes about his feeling of domination. An opponent’s fear, he says, you can “smell in their scent.” At this point, Mark has known only victory in thumping triumphs that leave him feeling like a god. Losing, he confesses, is unfathomable.
