It’s nice to see Dwayne Johnson doing something different.  He’s one of the world’s biggest box-office draws but there’s no denying he’s been typecast as the likeable, muscular action hero.  Now 53 years of age, The Smashing Machine is the closest he’s been to an “awards season” role – out of his comfort zone, playing a real-life person, and wearing a lot of prosthetics.  Academy voters gravitate towards such performances and there’s a chance he could earn a first Oscar nomination early next year.

In the lead role, Johnson slips into the tight shorts of Mark Kerr, a wrestler who rose to fame in the 1990s and laid groundwork for what would become a massive professional sport – mixed martial arts.  The film is written and directed by Benny Safdie (Good Times, Uncut Gems) who drew from a 2002 HBO documentary.  The focus is on the years from 1997 to 2000, and it delves into his fighting, his drug addictions, his rocky relationship with his girlfriend Dawn (Blunt), and his friendships with fellow fighters.  Johnson brings obvious physicality to the role but, aside from a few wild outbursts, plays Kerr as a kind, softly spoken individual.

This will be a weird analogy… but The Smashing Machine is like a lengthy conversation with a friend who has had too many beers.  They’ve got a bunch of interesting stories to tell but, in jumping all over the place, they never actually finish any of them.  Kerr has an addiction to painkillers, but we don’t see how this developed nor any part of his recovery (he’s just picked up from a rehab centre).  He seeks more pay from Japanese fight promoters, but we don’t learn if his demands were met.  He has an intense argument with Dawn in the film’s final half-hour, but we don’t follow it through to resolution (there’s just a few words offered up in the epilogue).

Mark Kerr may be a wrestling pioneer and an intriguing person but that doesn’t come through strongly enough in Safdie’s film.  I got tired of interviews with Japanese journalists and out-of-place interludes (like the sequence at a local fair).  It’s tweaked my curiosity enough to hunt down the 2002 documentary but as a standalone movie, The Smashing Machine isn’t interesting enough.