'The Smashing Machine' Proves The Rock Has Real Acting Chops
#336: "The Smashing Machine," "She Rides Shotgun," "Eyes Wide Shut," "Play Dirty"
Edition 336:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: We see whether The Rock really has acting chops in a new A24 awards play. Plus two new streaming movies—one with Mark Wahlberg and the other one actually worth watching. And a trip down Nicole Kidman memory lane. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” the movie that’s favored to win Best Picture.
The Smashing Machine
If there was ever going to be a movie to show us that Dwayne Johnson has real acting chops, it would be The Smashing Machine. A 6-foot-4, 260-pound bald man known as “The Rock” can’t just play an accountant, or an architect, or Robert Oppenheimer.
Playing early MMA pioneer Mark Kerr allows The Rock to be oiled up and larger than life, a comfortable starting place from which he can play against type, as Kerr is both a gentle giant to those inside the fighting community and a painkiller addict and a nasty fighter in his relationship with his girlfriend, played her by Emily Blunt (more on her in a sec).
I hate to lodge this criticism against any movie, but the simple fact of The Smashing Machine is that it’s not really a good enough story to make a good movie. Its fidelity to Kerr’s actual life, and the documentary about it by the same name, is admirable in a humanistic sense but perhaps betrays the filmmakers’ ability to develop this into anything greater than the sum of its parts.
The movie is basically like if you told your life story to someone, showed him your home videos, and then he went back and did a faithful recreation of it using gritty, handheld, VHS-style camerawork and the biggest movie star in the world playing you. You would, of course, be flattered, and it could honestly be that Johnson is too nice of a guy to take liberties on someone’s life story who is still very much alive and involved in the process. But outside of the passing of time, there’s really nothing really moving this story forward.
This movie simply would not exist were it not a vehicle for Johnson to prove his real acting chops. And he does show an ability few people thought he had, to disappear into a character. Sure, he’s always The Rock, but with the help of some fake hair and a little voice intonation, a viewer actually does achieve immersion into the world of the movie (a first for Johnson and doubly impressive because he’s 53 years old playing 25).
Whether or not that pays off with an Oscar nomination remains to be seen, but few people are as good at shaking hands and kissing babies on the campaign trail, so I don’t doubt it. As for box office business, who cares. A24 knew what it was getting into when it signed on—a pure vanity play.
Director Bennie Safdie—best known either as one-half of the Safdie brothers (Good Time, Uncut Gems) or as the villain from Happy Gilmore 2—continues the theme of total respect to the real life world by casting of a lot of actual fighters for main parts, whether it’s heavyweight champion boxer Oleksandr Usyk as a rival or pro MMA fighter Ryan Bader as Kerr’s friend Mark Coleman. The Kerr-Coleman relationship that plays out more like a traditional rom-com than Kerr’s with his actual girlfriend.
It’s Blunt who stands out against the blanket naturalism. She too attempts to play against type, but her posh British-ness doesn’t quite fit into the white trash chaos of her character. She’s capable of so much more than another nagging girlfriend/wife type, one that floats in and out of the movie without much consequence.
It’s difficult to come down on the wrong side of a movie that’s this good-hearted and stylish, but I gotta be me. As I always say, I’m a certified story whore!
Something New
She Rides Shotgun (VOD): I came to this movie through the book it was adapted from, because author Jordan Harper wrote another book (Everybody Knows) that was among my favorite novels of all-time. Movie-watchers don’t need to know that backstory, because this movie changes characters, plot, and conclusion from its source text. Other than the basic premise—a released convict gets marked for death by a deadly gang, and goes on the run with his daughter—this is an entirely different project, and given my initial disapproval of the discrepancy, it’s even more of a credit to this movie that by the end I had to admit it’s very very good.
Taron Egerton stars as our brute with a heart of gold (far more convincing as the latter than the former), but the real star of the show here is Ana Sophia Heger, who gives one of the best child acting performances of the year. Nick Rowland’s directing really impressed me too, including a pair of absolutely devastating shots for the movie’s climax and its sendoff. It’s a straightforward story but not without some surprises (and I don’t just mean the surprisingly gory action scenes). As far as down and dirty independent thrillers, this one is very very good.
Something Old
Eyes Wide Shut (1999): Good news for the freshly divorced Nicole Kidman: heartbreak feels good in a place like this! My mind immediately went to Stanley Kubrick’s last film, in which the famously difficult director either documented or caused the end of her marriage to Tom Cruise (it lasted 11 years?? wow). It’s difficult for me to describe this purposely mysterious movie about a New York City doctor who discovers a sex cult, where more is going on below the surface than on the actual screen.
You could spend two hours watching this movie and then 20 hours diving into theories about what it means (including whether Kubrick was killed before he completed this movie by the Illuminati). It’s hard for me to love movies as inaccessible as this but it’s the type of movie you will never forget once you’ve seen it.
Something To Stream
Play Dirty (Amazon Prime): If there’s one thing I know for certain in this uncertain movie landscape, it’s that spectacle for spectacles sake doesn’t belong on straight-to-streaming. Think like a streaming exec for a second. Why pay big money for just two hours of engagement time…unless the title is going to create buzz and drive sign-ups? Case in point: we’ve got a brand new Shane Black movie (he directed The Nice Guys and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang!) starring Mark Wahlberg and Lakeith Stanfield as part of a high stakes heist crew…had you ever heard of it??
This is the kind of big, dumb action comedy (pretty expensive too, by the looks of it) that would’ve made sense as a theatrical release. And by “sense,” I mean dollars. (At least then it would’ve gotten its horrific CGI cleaned up.)
On streaming the smaller things like, oh I don’t know, making any amount of sense tend to become a little bit more important. Black’s whit in dialogue often requires a scalpel, but Wahlberg is a sledgehammer. And Stanfield and supporting cast Tony Shaloud, Keegan Michael-Key and Nat Wolff are going just as broad. The double, triple and quadruple crosses and misdirects should be fun like Ocean’s but lack the ability to actually fool any audience member with half a brain.
The thing that bothers me isn’t that this movie didn’t turn out well—most movies don’t—it’s that strategically you could probably divide this budget up three or four ways and make smaller movies that fit better on streaming anyways (oooo EIGHT hours of engagement!). Next time, let’s try that.
Trailer Watch: Frankenstein
As good as One Battle After Another was, the odds-on favorite to win Best Picture right now is Hamnet, a fictional retelling of William Shakespeare’s relationship with his wife Agnes and son Hamnet, which may or may not have inspired the creation of his masterpiece Hamlet.
It’s pure arthouse fare, right in the wheelhouse for director Chloe Zhao, who let’s not forget directed 2021 Best Picture winner Nomadland. These are the kinds of stories she’s among the best in the world at telling, and even though I can hear the chorus of, “this is why no one cares about the Oscars anymore!” if this movie truly is better than One Battle, I will be rooting for it to win (I have serious doubts it will be).