The Smashing Machine: Forgettable movie that fails to convince anyone Mark Kerr is a UFC legend

Movie taglines are a funny thing.

They’re a marketing tool designed to give you a little more information on the poster, the trailer or on a social media post, to sell you on why you should give your time to that particular title. It’s supposed to be a net positive.

But not for The Smashing Machine, whose tagline makes a very explicit promise: “The unforgettable true story of a UFC legend”.

The problem with spelling it out on the box is you have to now deliver exactly that, and the film starring Dwayne Johnson as former UFC fighter Mark Kerr is neither unforgettable nor does it make a convincing case that Kerr was a UFC legend.

Kerr was a former wrestler and one of the contenders who made a name for himself early in the UFC competition as the then-upstart league set out to be taken seriously. He won a bunch of titles including championships.

The Smashing Machine almost seems to downplay this. Over two hours, what you’ll get out of the film is this: Kerr won some fights, lost some fights, struggled with addiction, had a tempestuous relationship with then girlfriend Dawn, and an appreciation for Japanese pottery.

Drawn from the 2002 documentary about Kerr, The Smashing Machine tracks him (Johnson) as he shuffles back and forth between his US base and Japan, where the UFC had found an audience.

Those early scenes are among the film’s best. They’re artful, slice-of-life vignettes that literally follow Kerr as he sits on planes, goes up escalators, walks into shops and trains. The compositions by writer and director Benny Safdie and cinematographer Maceo Bishop are beautiful to look at.

Here, he comes off as a gentle and observant person wandering through his world, and not what you might expect from someone who punches, kicks and wrestles for a living.

But then the film morphs and leans more into the drama, including the toxic fireworks between Kerr and Dawn (Emily Blunt), which only gets more tiresome as it goes on. If The Smashing Machine is trying to make a case for why these two people are ultimately good for each other, it fails abysmally.

It’s a horrible relationship, from both sides, and, in a rare misstep for Blunt, her performance is little more than oscillating between batting her eyelashes at Kerr and then screaming bloody murder. You never get any sense of who Dawn is or wants to be.

The way he is with Dawn also makes Kerr less appealing as a character you’re supposed to root for. They shouldn’t be together, and you don’t want to watch them try to be together.

There’s also the awkward fact that when Johnson and Blunt co-starred as love interests in The Jungle Cruise, they had zero chemistry, which is repeated here in The Smashing Machine. It’s not like no one involved with this film even watched their previous onscreen pairing to realise the folly of this casting.

The story beats of Kerr and Dawn’s relationship are woven between the plotline of his career-building and his addiction to painkillers, which all feels very been-there-seen-that.

Kerr isn’t cast as someone distinct and worthy of his own film. If he made great innovations in the sport or the competition, or raised its profile, and we’re not saying he didn’t, but The Smashing Machine certainly didn’t tell that story.

The Smashing Machine is the first feature from Safdie, who won best director at the Venice Film Festival where it premiered a month ago. Safdie is an actor and filmmaker whose previous works with his brother Josh included widely acclaimed movies Uncut Gems and Good Time.

The two Safdies went their separate ways, creatively, and now both have sports biopics out within months of each other. Josh Safdie’s movie, Marty Supreme, is due for release in December and features Timothee Chalamet as a 1950s ping pong player trying to mainstream the sport to Americans.

The film is a departure for Johnson in that it’s a quieter performance which doesn’t involve his usual schtick of mugging for the cameras, and he’s wearing prosthetics, so he’s getting notice and there’s a campaign underfoot in trying to secure him an Oscar nomination.

While he’s fine, and it is refreshing to see Johnson be something other than a tequila salesman, the performance lacks the complexity of his more accomplished rivals in a year with a lot of stiff competition, including from the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis.

It doesn’t mean he won’t get there at some point, but The Smashing Machine, for something that promised an unforgettable story about a legend, is too ordinary to make a real impression.

It’s certainly not going to convert anyone into a UFC fan.

Rating: 2.5/5

The Smashing Machine is in cinemas on October 2