Is it possible to be a normal and well-adjusted human being when your greatest joy is beating other people to a pulp with your bare hands? The Smashing Machine wants us to wrestle with this question. Mark Kerr (Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) is chasing physical dominance and violence against his opponents inside the ring, but outside the ring, he goes out of his way to show others kindness and calm. The dissonance between these two versions of Kerr we are presented with is the central tension in the movie.
We follow Mark Kerr primarily at the turn of the millennium, when he is a pioneering mixed martial arts fighter. Kerr has a fraught relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Emily Blunt), and they frequently argue. One topic of argument is Kerr’s overuse of opioids, which has been getting worse and worse. As a big tournament approaches and mixed martial arts gains international popularity, Kerr must balance the needs of training and competition with his personal life.
There is a long tradition of fighting movies, of course. They tend to fall into two camps: inspirational stories about underdogs in life and in the ring who overcome, and character studies of flawed men whose drive to fight comes from something dark inside them. But the private lives of the fighters tend to be lives of pent-up rage in both camps; the key difference is whether fighting is viewed as a healthy outlet or an unhealthy one.
The Smashing Machine is different. In Mark’s personal life we find very few aggressive traits – in fact, he seems to be a very sensitive person. After losing his first fight, he goes to the showers and cries. When a lady is staring at his bruises in a waiting room, he engages her in conversation to explain mixed martial arts and tries to win her over.
But his fighting career begins to bleed over into the rest of his life as the movie progresses. His opioid use spirals out of control. When Dawn hits a nerve in an argument, he smashes through a door. But he also becomes very passive-aggressive towards her – complaining that she doesn’t take care of their house, and acting cold and distant when she comes to support his fights. So this is less a portrait of an already broken man, and more an examination of how fighting can take a well-adjusted guy and make him ugly.
The Rock gives a great performance here. It feels strange to call it a transformation with his wrestling background, but that’s what it is. He is shedding a lot of his movie star persona in this film and creating a character that is nuanced and deep. Along with that, his athleticism, along with the casting of MMA fighters to round out the cast, gives the movie a raw credibility that you can certainly feel in the fighting sequences.
In many ways, Dawn functions as a source of conflict in the movie. I was mostly neutral on Blunt’s performance and the way the movie handled her character. It could be seen as reinforcing some stereotypes about women – she is nagging and argues in an ugly way. But the film does seek to understand her more deeply than her stereotypical behavior. Films need to be able to portray flawed women, too, and it doesn’t mean they are saying all women are flawed. However, with Dawn being really the only female character here, I can see how this could rub people the wrong way.
The film loses steam in the way it ends. With the way that it is subverting typical fighting movies, the climactic tournament doesn’t carry the same weight as we are used to in the genre. It doesn’t really find a satisfying way to wrap up the character study of Mark, either, leaving us to wonder what the movie is ultimately saying about him. But I found the exploration of Mark’s psychology and The Rock’s performance to be worth the watch, even if it doesn’t have all the answers.
