The Smashing Machine

Directed by Benny Safdie, The Smashing Machine follows Dwayne Johnson’s Mark Kerr as he attempts to overcome a series of personal and professional obstacles to become a mixed-martial arts champion. Filmmaker Safdie, armed with his own screenplay, delivers an extremely (and often egregiously) subdued character study that benefits from Johnson’s lived-in turn as the soft spoken central character, and there’s little doubt, ultimately, that The Smashing Machine would hardly be worth mentioning were it not for the actor’s eye-opening and flat-out mesmerizing performance – with Johnson’s first-class work certainly heightened by Safdie’s documentary-like modus operandi. And while the picture has been sprinkled with a handful of memorable moments and digressions, including an intense domestic argument between Mark and his girlfriend (Emily Blunt’s Dawn), The Smashing Machine, which runs for a palpably overlong 123 minutes, ultimately comes off as a meandering and repetitive endeavor that just barely manages to squeak by based on its star’s incredible (and transformative) efforts – although, by that same token, it’s more than a little difficult to figure out what initially drew Safdie to this mostly inert material.

**1/2 out of ****