It’s a frustrating thing when a movie gets so much right, but doesn’t quite find its way to come together in a fully satisfying way. That, I am afraid, was my experience of The Smashing Machine.
Dwayne Johnson, with a masterful make-up job by the multiple Oscar-winning Kazu Hiro, delivering an intimate performance unlike any we have seen from him before… Emily Blunt playing the adult bimbo woman with a tough edge unlike any we have seen from her before… Benny Safdie showing great still at delivering moments of intimacy that feel very, very grounded and human.
Sounds like a great movie. And it’s not a bad movie. But at the core of my concerns is that I feel like Benny, in his love for the material, forgot that most of the audience is coming in cold and we don’t know, even broadly, the story he knew so well by the time he made the film.
I don’t need every question I have while watching a movie to be answered. And my issue with The Smashing Machine isn’t so much that I couldn’t fill in the blanks. It’s that I couldn’t find the focus of the movie, aside from the existence on the central character, Mark Kerr.
What is tricky about most bio-pics is that filmmakers often try to get too much of the real story into the 2 hour-ish movie. They don’t select a small enough bite to fully dramatize the story fully. That is not the case here. The window is pretty short. I think.
The bulk of the movie seems to be in the period of the late years of Mark Kerr’s career. Though UFC is mentioned a lot in the marketing for the film, he only fought there in 2 major events in the course of 1 year, 1997. The movie is primarily focused on a series of events in Japan, the UFC-international-competitor PRIDE Fighting Championships, which would become a 7-year chunk of Kerr’s fighting career. He made a few efforts to come back after PRIDE, but they didn’t really take and the\y aren’t dramatized in the film.
So the movie isn’t really about creating or building the UFC, though Kerr has been honored by the UFC as a “pioneer.” That doesn’t bother me on its face, except that it meant that the movie had a very different track than the marketing suggested.
During his time primarily focused on PRIDE, Kerr dated and eventually married and had a kid with Dawn Staples, played by Emily Blunt in the film. But it’s not the story of a love that built Kerr up to become his best self. It’s a sometimes great/often horrible relationship between 2 people who love each other but seem mismatched.
Then there is the 3rd wheel, Mark Coleman, played by Ryan Bader, who is “the best friend,” but even more important, a much more successful fighter in the long run. This is really the most powerful relationship in the movie, even though you will not know - unless you are a fan - who Mark Coleman is when you enter the theater and you won’t be 100% clear when you leave. What we do have is a beautifully rendered relationship between 2 men who are committed deeply to one another (no, not in a sexual way).
The problem is, the movie isn’t about Kerr & Coleman and, eventually, how Coleman eclipsed Kerr as injuries kept him from rising any further than he did. The Girl… Dawn… excellently played by Blunt… bunch of great scenes between Dawn & Mark. But the movie isn’t about Mark’s passion for the woman. The movie is about a gentle giant who stays positive no matter what he has to overcome… though the movie isn’t really that focused on this as a matter of narrative.
One of those weird things that is very hard to overcome… Mark Kerr goes through a lot of stuff in the course of the movie… but he doesn’t really change at all. I mean, not A to C… and A to B is arguable. And there is nothing that Dwayne Johnson can fix about this. Kerr’s ultimate kindness is who he is. It’s not boring… but it is very limiting.
I actually like the ending… which I will not give away here. It reasserts the primary theme of the movie, which is good.
In a weird way, I would like this movie more if it was a TV series, with a full season of episodes to be extracted from this 2 hours of material. Here is the focus, here is the thing in the way, here is how Mark Kerr overcame or didn’t overcome it. This is not to say that Benny Safdie shot it like TV, but rather that the dramatic moments are here… they just aren’t connected effectively. Any 10 minutes of the film might be excellent. But as we move on to the next thing, the question of “Why did this part of the story get included?” and always, “Why are you telling me this whole story?’
It was like a day in the ocean, trying to catch a wave, and nice looking waves come along, but none of them sustain long enough for a fully satisfying ride.
There are a lot of great looking waves here. Dwayne Johnson is very good. I don’t think he is a lock for an Oscar nod, but he certainly is a legitimate contender. I don’t expect Emily Blunt has enough here for a nod, but one never knows… those female acting categories are often more open than one might hope.
There is nothing “F” about this movie. And there is a lot of “A.” But in the end, I left the theater feeling “incomplete.”
Until tomorrow…