Benny Safdie’s The Smashing Machine has all the familiar hallmarks of Hollywood biopics, but its intensity and emotional clarity make it entirely worthwhile — to say nothing of its enrapturing and transformative lead performance. Safdie, one half of the brother duo behind gambling thriller Uncut Gems, goes solo for a film about addiction of a different sort, as wrestler-turned-action-star Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson brings his long-gestating passion project to life. It’s a personal re-invention for both artists, and while it may not re-invent the wheel, it most certainly bedazzles it.
Johnson plays Mark Kerr, a mixed martial arts (MMA) competitor during the sport’s rise to prominence in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, i.e. before the UFC had become a global juggernaut threatening to bring its octagonal cage to the White House lawn. Hulking yet soft-spoken, Kerr is introduced to us much as he is in John Hyams’ 2002 lo-fi documentary of the same name: politely explaining the origins of his nasty black eye to a curious old woman in a doctor’s waiting room. Hyams’ doc is the structural blueprint for Safdie’s script, which lifts scenes and lines of dialogue wholesale, and occasionally apes Hyam’s scrappy, video tape cinéma vérité, but the film also imaginatively fills in the documentaries gaps, and ends up in difficult places that Hyams’ camera couldn’t go.
