Benny Safdi “Shock machine” Not what you think, especially if you think that this is a film about a British guy who thinks that his writing machine is the peak.
“The Smashing Machine”, it would seem, bears all the distinctive features of something more rude, dark and more anxious than it is. This is a solo directorial debut of the younger Safdi, whose films with his brother Josh rarely did not come to mind in an alarming noise. Add this sensitivity to the real story about the mixed brothel of martial arts in the late 90s, and naturally spend most of The Smashing Machine, preparing for the tragedy, for some ear descent into a machi-country.
Nevertheless, “The Smashing Machine”, in the title role of Dwayne Johnson as a MMA pioneer, Mark Kerr, is something more simple and less curious. The lack of probing has never been something that you could accuse the Safdi brothers in the film; These are directors who loaded the camera into the body of the owner of the jewelry store in “Unrecognizable precious stones.” But, despite its granular aesthetics of VHS, “The Smashing Machine” is an amazingly traditional and strangely unheard of film, although it gives Johnson an indie film for one of his best performances.
Like Mark, Johnson depleted most of his charisma on the big screen. Part-muscular, often without a shirt, often rages in the ring, is close to Johnson’s own professional struggle that the early scenes look almost as documentary. But a megawatt smile and a feverish rise for eyebrows disappeared. Usually Johnson’s honed bald head is covered with closely shortened dark head of the hair.
In the opening of the film, Mark raps about his sense of dominance. Fear of the enemy, he says, you can “smell.” At the moment, Mark knew only victory in the knocking victories that make him feel God. Losing, he admits, incomprehensible.
Of course, the laws that Mark will lose soon, and his honored sense of invincibility will collapse. The Smashing Machine bounces between the house of Mark and Japan, where the championship in combating pride is taking place. It is here that Mark, a much champion, was shot down illegal, but, nevertheless, a humiliating step. After that, the match is relied on on a tie, but we stink the defeats never dissipate.
The real battle, in any case, is at home. The dependence of the brand on opioids on the extreme extremes that he suffers becomes desperate. The Smashing Machine is based on the 2002 John Hayam documentary, and part of the nature of this film was the curiosity of Mark's extreme violence in the ring and his sweet passivity. In the film Safdie, Mark is asked in the doctor’s waiting room, whether the fighters hate each other during the battle. “Absolutely not,” he replies.
But while we have no doubt that the sincerity of Mark is as serious as the muscular,-Johnson also exudes the inner bustle and the struggle to keep his rage in fear when to feed his wounds in his ego. His body is so hard as if he could click at any moment.
This applies to the brand, most of all, around his wife, Dounced Steaps (Emily Blunt), the former Playboy model, which showed an alternatively supporting and insensitive to the situation of Mark. They often fly, sometimes immediately before the match, sometimes from how to make it shaking it. When he tries to abandon opioids, he takes her night drink as a provocation. “Treat me as a man,” he tells her.
This is an awkward, possibly condemning a characteristic that would be even brighter if there was not a blant’s beat as a performer. But he drops the course “The Smashing Machine”, especially when the film seems to want to rely more on other central relations: Mark and his friend, coach and sometimes competitor Mark Cowlman (played by former Bellator champion Ryan Bader).
In his films with his brother, Safdi for a long time brought real figures to his cinema, blurring fictional boundaries. Bader gives “The Smashing Machine” a dose of a documentary in his presence, but I would say that Johnson’s proximity to this world gives the film his most convincing echo in real life.
I think that Johnson is also very good at full mode of the movie star, especially when he has a chance to crookedly undermine his presence on the big screen in comedies such as “Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle” or “Tooth Fairy”. But it is also charming to see how he so carefully settled on such a character as he was in The Smashing Machine, completely deprived of his charisma.
Nevertheless, the potential of this performance is disappointed with a film that cannot be able to fight with a violent world around Mark, instead, resorting to the gratitude of these MMA combatants. What resonates, nevertheless, this is a portrait of the human Colossus who learns to take defeat – a mountain of a man who looks as if he, without trying, break someone's head at any time. Instead, he takes a deep breath, not.
“The Smashing Machine”, the release of A24, is evaluated by R from the cinema for the language and some drug abuse. Opening hours: 123 minutes. Two and a half stars out of four.
