I’m continually impressed with what Dwayne Johnson has done as an actor. Sure, he got a massive head start thanks to his wrestling persona, but if you think about the journey from his early days as the villain in The Mummy Returns to his latest role in Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine, it really is night and day.
The film tells the true story of Mark Kerr (Johnson), a small-time wrestler grinding it out: training, traveling, doing whatever he can to move up in the sport. At home, his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt) is ready for the next phase of life: marriage, kids, stability. Kerr, however, is stuck in a loop of being one step forward and ten steps back. Even so, he carries a strangely optimistic outlook, convinced that the big breakthrough is just around the corner.
I’m a big fan of Johnson and have enjoyed most of his movies, even though he’s often playing variations of the same “strong but vulnerable” character, and you know he’s always going to come out on top. Here, though, he completely disappears into the role. His voice is soft and measured, nothing like what you’d expect from a dominant fighter. His cadence is different, his physicality altered. With hair and makeup, his forehead looks shorter, his face is transformed, and the way he walks and holds himself makes him nearly unrecognizable. It’s a performance he’s never given before, and both the physical and emotional transformation are genuinely impressive.
I just wish the movie around him were as strong.
Safdie’s direction is solid, and the wrestling scenes are brutal, but as I watched, I kept thinking: so what? As Kerr’s story moves forward with the pressure to perform and the physical, he eventually begins to self-medicate with pills to numb both. It begins to erode his career and his relationship with Dawn, and nearly kills him in the ring.
But beyond that, there’s no real insight, no moment of reckoning that feels earned. The film just… ends. I kept waiting for something more to happen, for some kind of payoff, and it never arrived.
Blunt is excellent, as always, but she’s underserved by the material. Dawn is mostly written as the endlessly supportive girlfriend who gets hurt and then comes back, and it feels like a missed opportunity.
In the end, it’s the performances that carry The Smashing Machine, especially Johnson’s fantastic work. They almost convince you the film is more substantial than it actually is.
