Dwayne Johnson is a big-hearted, approachable Hollywood star who could snap you like a twig without so much as working up a sweat. He almost certainly wouldn’t do it because the man is a mensch, both on-camera and off, but there is always the chance that he might, if he properly lost his rag and momentarily saw red. He knows it and we know it and this tense shared understanding may be part of his appeal.
In Johnson’s new film, The Smashing Machine, the 53-year-old actor portrays MMA fighter Mark Kerr, “255 pounds of pure muscle”, who is working to wean himself off an addiction to opioids. At home, newly sober, Kerr notes that his girlfriend Dawn (played by Emily Blunt) has for some reason put semi-skimmed milk in his smoothie. It’s no big deal, he assures her, he simply assumed she would know he prefers whole milk, just as he assumed she would remember to prune his favourite cactus and to fish those disgusting leaves out of the pool.
The Smashing Machine, for the record, contains a number of noisy MMA contests. None, though, are quite as charged and gruelling as the scenes inside Kerr’s house. The more Kerr shrugs and smiles, the more the tension levels ramp up, gently hinting at what might happen next. Benny Safdie’s sports drama teases violence the way a 1930s romcom teases sex.
The Smashing Machine isn’t perfect, but it’s an excellent acting showcase, fitting a bold new frame around its A-list star and allowing him plenty of room to find his range. Johnson’s portrayal of Kerr has already been tipped as an Oscar contender (disclaimer: at this stage of the race, every half-decent performance gets tipped as an Oscar contender). It also provides a welcome counterweight to such feel-good entertainments as Jungle Cruise (2021) and Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017). And yet tellingly, The Smashing Machine doesn’t dismantle Johnson’s screen persona so much as identify its dark recessive gene, gracefully matching the actor with his subject. One might say that Kerr is the part he was born to play: a plausible, professional man of violence who has learned to hold himself in check.
Johnson was once a smashing machine himself, the heavyweight artist formerly known as The Rock. He’s the teenage delinquent turned WWF superstar who parlayed sporting celebrity into a topline Hollywood career. As befits a pro wrestler, Johnson is brilliant at leveraging his influence and drumming up business and his ambassadorial, outward-facing attitude stands in stark contrast to that of most of his peers. He’s an Instagram sensation (392 million followers) and a registered independent who plays well to all quadrants (young and old, male and female). He’s charismatic and self-deprecating; he’s amiable and quick-witted. He could kill you but he won’t, because he’d rather be your friend. This, it occurs, might be the definition of a successful action hero.
Hollywood likes working with athletes because they have name recognition and look as if they might be able to perform their own stunts. It’s a partnership that extends back to Esther Williams and Johnny Weissmuller and runs the gamut from Arnold Schwarzenegger to OJ Simpson, the former NFL running back who starred in The Towering Inferno (1974) and The Naked Gun franchise and was famously passed over for The Terminator (1984) on account of being “too nice”. The Rock has similarly built his reputation on playing good guys and saviour types – a lifeguard in Baywatch (2017); the rescue pilot in San Andreas (2015) – but he’s a much better actor than Simpson ever was (Schwarzenegger, too, for that matter) and could play a remorseless assassin without breaking stride. Rolling Stone once likened him to a gentle grizzly bear, which sounds fair enough. Except that grizzly bears are wont to turn on you. If they were riled, let’s say, or were simply horsing around.
It’s been said that Gene Hackman had the hardest, scariest smile in movies, but Johnson’s sunny blast is just as alarming in its way. It’s deployed to great effect in The Smashing Machine, as Kerr politely asks a fellow airline passenger to lift the shade so that he can see the sunset, or when he cajoles a nervous chemist into writing a prescription. Kerr is a big man and knows he looks intimidating. He smiles to reassure people that he’s not about to rip their heads off, and yet it’s annoying to have to be constantly smiling and this irritation – this anger – eventually creeps into his smile. He’s a professional strongman in a world full of meek pygmies and it’s only in the ring, in competition, that he feels truly himself. “It’s the highest of the highs, it’s orgasmic,” he explains to the hapless, long-suffering Dawn, who knows that she will never satisfy her man the way a bodyslam can.
If sporting dramas teach us anything, it’s that violence in the arena has a tendency to spill over. Domestic life is a prison; the athlete kicks off and explodes. That’s the message of This Sporting Life (1963) and Raging Bull (1980) and it is partly the message of The Smashing Machine, too, although Safdie’s film is keen to swerve the genre’s most obvious cliches to the point where the drama frustrates our expectations. We spend half the film braced for Kerr to erupt, only for the man to heave a deep breath and refix his sunny smile.
The film’s careful, easy-does-it approach is no doubt reflective of Kerr’s own lived experience. But it also chimes with the ethos of Johnson himself, a man who understands his audience and would rather bring people along with him than have them bolting for the exit door. He wants an Oscar, of course, but not at the cost of sabotaging his brand. He’d like darker roles, too, but he is naturally geared towards sunshine.
“I don’t like sad endings,” the actor once said, explaining his choice of roles. “Life brings that s*** – I don’t want it in my movies.” The Smashing Machine brings Johnson closer to the edge – closer to his limits – than he’s ever come in the past. His performance is terrific; knotty, nuanced and intense. But it blinks at crucial moments and finally leaves us wanting more. One day he’ll go the whole hog, although the man may need some outside help. Semi-skimmed milk in his smoothie; a fresh dump of leaves in the pool.
‘The Smashing Machine’ is in cinemas from 3 October
