The Smashing Machine

I was more interested in Mark Kerr and Dwayne Johnson than in the film itself. The first thing that stands out is obvious: Johnson is unrecognizable. Not only because of the makeup, the hair or the face, but because at times he manages to erase the image of "The Rock" quite well. Here he is not playing an invincible star, but a man who is enormous on the outside and quite broken inside.

The film works best when it stays close to that contradiction. Mark Kerr may look like a machine built to destroy opponents, but outside the ring he conveys exhaustion, dependence, insecurity and a fragility that does not match the body we see. That is where it functions most strongly: when it shows a man built to take blows who does not really know what to do with the blows that come from within.

Johnson is probably giving the most serious and worked-through performance of his career. He surprised me in a good way. There is an unusual restraint in him, a way of looking that tries not to sell heroism. The best of his work is in the moments when he seems lost, dimmed, as if the champion did not know where to put all the pain he carries.

The relationship with Dawn felt exhausting to me. I found her unbearable for much of the film, although I understand that the intention is not to present her simply as "the bad one". Emily Blunt is good, but the dynamic between them is so toxic, repetitive and rough that at times it becomes tiring. At home, Mark finds no rest: there is another fight, another pressure, another place where he cannot breathe.

There the film does achieve something uncomfortable: the ring almost seems simpler than private life. In a fight there are rules, physical pain and a result. In the relationship there is dependence, reproach, addiction, fear, ego and two people hurting each other without knowing how to leave the circle. The idea is there and it has strength.

My big problem is the form. That cheap nineties-documentary aesthetic, with grain, dirty camera and ugly lighting, pushed me away quite a bit. I understand what Benny Safdie is looking for: authenticity, period, roughness, the feeling of being glued to a sports world that was still unpolished. But one thing is to feel real and another is to look cheap. Too often, for me, it was the second.

That visual choice makes the film seem poorer than it probably is. There are moments when Johnson is doing very serious work, and the image seems determined to take away cinematic value from it. I did not always feel rawness; sometimes I felt forced ugliness. As if the film were too concerned with looking like a VHS documentary from the time and not enough with finding a beauty of its own.

The music did not convince me either. It has that pasted-on nineties feel, like a soundtrack placed there to manufacture period rather than express something true. It did not reach Kerr's inner pain. That is why I kept thinking how well something like Alice in Chains' "Nutshell" would have fitted: dry sadness, intimate defeat, weariness and inner collapse. A silent scene with Mark alone and that song would have been brutal.

The film seems determined to escape the conventional sports biopic, and that has value. It does not chase easy epic, the big comeback or the fight filmed as glorious triumph. Its path is flatter, more anti-Rocky, more focused on erosion. But sometimes, in trying to avoid clichés, it is left without a strong enough emotion. Not everything dry is deep; sometimes it is just distant.

The defeat against Fujita works as a narrative ending because it dismantles the invincible man. It is not just losing a fight: it is losing an identity. If you have been built as a machine, the day the machine fails you no longer know what remains underneath. That stretch makes sense, although the film did not always carry me there with all the force it could have had.

What I did really like was the closing with the real Mark Kerr doing the shopping. It is a simple and very beautiful image, because it breaks with all the mythology before it. After seeing him as champion, addict, huge body, icon of a brutal sport and lost man, ending with him in an everyday situation returns him to something more human: life goes on, even after the myth has broken.

In the end, for me it remains an interesting, irregular film, more valuable because of its protagonist than because of its form. Dwayne Johnson truly surprises and Mark Kerr is a character with real weight, but the cheap faux-documentary aesthetic and the music kept me at a distance. I was more interested in the man than in the style. It has powerful moments, a human ending and a performance that deserves respect, but I do not see it as a fully rounded work.