'The Smashing Machine' review: Dwayne Johnson stars as UFC fighter in low-energy sports drama

In the opening minutes of "The Smashing Machine," UFC fighter Mark Kerr describes what it’s like to beat another man senseless in the ring. "You can feel almost instantly whether he’s gonna give in or not," Kerr says in a tone of almost childlike wonder.

"The Smashing Machine" isn’t really introducing us to Kerr, however, but to the actor who plays him, Dwayne Johnson.

Yes, we all know Johnson, himself a former wrestler, whose hulking physique and boyish smile turned him into a star of big-tent Hollywood entertainments like "The Scorpion King" and "Rampage." With "The Smashing Machine," Johnson appears to be going for Oscar gold, burying his bankable face under prosthetics to play a real-life figure — the same formula that Nicole Kidman, Charlize Theron and Gary Oldman employed to get their statues. What’s more, if the filmmaking Safdie brothers could turn a lowbrow comic like Adam Sandler into a critical darling (see 2019’s "Uncut Gems"), then maybe Benny Safdie, writing and directing solo, can elevate Johnson into a lauded thespian.

Drawing from a 2002 documentary of the same name, "The Smashing Machine" presents Kerr as a friendly dude whose gift for brutality makes him virtually unbeatable. "I’m trying to intellectualize it with you," he tells a reporter about the possibility of losing, "but, yeah, I can’t." But then it happens, and Kerr’s hidden opioid use blossoms into full-fledged addiction. Staying sober will be a struggle, especially around his hard-partying girlfriend, Dawn, played by Emily Blunt in tight jeans and blue eyeshadow. (Anyone who tells an addict, "You’re no fun anymore" is probably worth re-evaluating.)

It's a dramatic-sounding story — so why is the movie less than riveting? One reason is that Johnson rarely emotes or even changes expression, either from a desire to display an actorly interiority or from having a face laden with latex. (The makeup artist is Kazu Hiro, who helped Oldman win his Oscar and earned one of his own for "The Darkest Hour.") Another reason is that Safdie’s screenplay meanders aimlessly until the very end, when Kerr realizes he may have to fight his longtime friend Mark Coleman (played by a guileless Ryan Bader, a UFC fighter making his feature film debut).

Whatever Safdie saw in Kerr’s story does not come through on the screen. Was Kerr emblematic of something? Was he the first, best or last? An influence, an unsung hero? Or maybe it’s a more personal story about a man whose deepest addiction was not to drugs but to winning. All those angles can be glimpsed in the film, but none of them clearly.

"The Smashing Machine" closes with a minute or two of the real Kerr pushing a grocery cart through a supermarket and out into a parking lot. The movie has changed its mind: In the end, Kerr was just a guy.

By Rafer Guzmán

rafer.guzman@newsday.com